ABSTRACT
This chapter examines selected collections of devotional music by Augsburg's Catholic composers, music that could have found a home in any number of these para-liturgical or non-liturgical venues. In these prints Marian, Eucharistic and Christological themes come to the fore, with musical styles reflecting a range of different aptitudes and interests among contemporary performers. Rosary devotions were becoming increasingly common in the era of the Counter-Reformation and were probably practised in Augsburg as early as 1574, when a Confraternity of the Rosary was founded at the Dominican church. It is neither easy nor advisable to make a firm distinction between Marian songbooks and songsheets and the large amount of Marian devotional literature that circulated in Counter-Reformation Augsburg. The rise of confessionalized Catholic music in Augsburg was not only a unique phenomenon, but also may be observed in numerous towns, cities and courts in Catholic Germany by the turn of the seventeenth century.
