ABSTRACT
In 1562, the Council of Trent discussed the provision of music in the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. Although addressing many issues of abuse within the Catholic Church, in most doctrinal matters the Council approved the status quo. Protestantism therefore maintained an independent identity, and the schism remained permanent. For four centuries (until the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s) congregational participation in music remained almost exclusively under the ownership of the Protestant Churches. Music had been appropriated by the reformers to further their cause. The fact that the church songbook genre developed out of the liturgical order, however, demonstrates that Brown’s assertion that the sixteenth-century hymn-printing industry was ‘directed primarily to a domestic market’ does not apply to early Reformation Strasbourg, and in all likelihood does not apply to the situation in other major German cities at this time either.
