Choir directors around churches are either functionaries or cultural protesters - both without knowing it.
The project traces the foundations of secular choirs dedicated to church music around 1900 and asks about the ideological, theological and social-historical backgrounds.
In this process, Cultural Protestantism in the German-speaking world and thus also the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach's music - the two inseparably linked - play a central role.
The framework for the project is the project of the Musicological Institute of the University of Bern "The choral life in the cities of Bern and Fribourg in the long 19th century".
My contribution consists in demonstrating the importance of Cultural Protestantism, the dominant cultural current in the German Empire between 1880 and 1914, for the rapid growth of a non-liturgical, sacred choral culture in Switzerland around 1900. This connection is still little researched, although there were direct personal connections to the choral scene in Strasbourg, Alsace-Austria, the intellectual center of liturgical-artistic Cultural Protestantism. This requires a discussion of cultural Protestantism in its political, religious, and cultural implications and the theological foundations in Albrecht Rietschl and Adolf von Harnack, as well as the liturgical and musical applications in Friedrich Spitta and Julius Smend (especially in the Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst).