Music and Identity Construction: the National Churches in Rome (16th-17th centuries)

This paper fits into a research project entitled Music and identity construction: the national churches in Rome (16th-17th centuries), founded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (University of Liège, Belgium). For both pragmatic and epistemological reasons, the national churches in Rome were most often studied in isolation. The project strives to approach the churches as part of a larger corpus. This research aims to develop the study of music in the national churches in Rome by asking the fundamental question of cultural exchanges between these institutions and the nations they represented in the pontifical city. To this end, an analysis is undertaken of how the liturgical and paraliturgical traditions, as an expression of ‘nationhood’, constituted one of the axes around which a community strengthened its identity in a foreign country. This paper will present an overview of the key aspects and results obtained so far in this research project.