Friedrich Ludwig (musicologist)

Friedrich Ludwig (8 May 1872 – 3 October 1930) was a German historian, musicologist, and college instructor. His name is closely associated with the exploration and rediscovery of medieval music in the 20th century, particularly the compositional techniques of the Ars Nova and the isorhythmic motet.

Ludwig was born in Potsdam, and after completing the abitur at the Victoria-Gymnasium (Now Helmholtz-Gymnasium, Potsdam), he studied historiography with Harry Bresslau at the University of Strasbourg, where he earned a doctorate in 1896. He owed his musical education on one hand to Gustav Jacobsthal, the only full-time professor of historical musicology in Germany at the time, and on the other hand to philosopher-organist Albert Schweitzer and composer Hans Pfitzner, both of whom he met in Strasbourg where he settled. For about a decade, Ludwig made numerous trips throughout Europe to investigate the sources of medieval music. He joined the faculty of Strasbourg University upon Jacobsthal's retirement in 1905, first as a lecturer, and in 1910 as an associate professor of music history. He was expelled from Strasbourg when it fell into French hands at the end of the First World War. In 1920, he became an associate professor at the University of Göttingen, where he served as Rector in 1929/30.

Friedrich Ludwig belonged to the school of thought among cultural historians that did not ascribe to the Romantic view that Baroque Polyphony was the only type of polyphony of highest worth; rather, he sought to explore its historical development and evolution, leading to a critical reassessment of earlier music. These researches have made the practice and theory of music of the Middle Ages accessible. His research area was music before Palestrina-style polyphony; namely, the Ars Antiqua, Ars Nova, and the polyphony of the Franco-Flemish school. As a historian, Ludwig was already familiar with the cultural unity of Europe in the Late Middle Ages, and he approached it through the narrative and source-based methodology of Leopold von Ranke, of whom Ludwig's teacher Bresslau was a disciple. These methods had, for instance, moved Slavic cultures into a new perspective. In contrast to the prevailing view among music historians of the 19th century - a view epitomized in Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) asserting that music is an art in and of itself, Ludwig followed a systematic method to explore the relationships between music and other cultural phenomena such as architecture and literature, finding in it unity through the poetry of medieval languages. For this purpose, he used the philology of High Middle German, the Romance languages, and medieval Latin, the chorale, and historic chronicles. He made stylistic comparison of primary sources to date musical works, and introduced these methods to music historiography.

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