This article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical support for his larger arguments about the harmonious properties of Christian song and its resonances in a divinely ordered universe. For Harant, listening and singing were a means of sounding out commonalities and differences with the Christians and Muslims he encountered on his travels through the Holy Land. Monte sent his music across Europe to the English recusant William Byrd, initiating a compositional exchange that imagined beleaguered Bohemian and English Catholics as Israelites in exile, yearning for Jerusalem. Collectively, these three case studies suggest that musical thinking in Rudolfine Prague did not revolve around or descend from the court or sovereign; rather, Rudolf II's most erudite subjects listened, sang, and composed to understand themselves in relation to others.

本文使用了鲁道夫二世帝国宫廷的三位著名成员，即天文学家约翰内斯·开普勒，作曲家菲利普·德·蒙特和冒险家克雷斯托夫·哈兰特，来描述音乐帮助欧洲人了解近代早期身份和差异的一些方式。对于开普勒来说，他在奥斯曼帝国代表团访问期间听到的不熟悉的穆斯林祈祷间隔为他关于基督教歌曲的和谐特性及其在神圣秩序的宇宙中的共鸣的更大论点提供了经验支持。对于哈兰特来说，听和唱歌是一种表达与他在圣地旅行中遇到的基督徒和穆斯林的共同点和差异的方法。蒙特将他的音乐传遍了欧洲，传给了英国的威廉·伯德，发起了一次构想性的交流，想象着陷入困境的波希米亚人和英国天主教徒是流亡中的以色列人，向往耶路撒冷。总的来说，这三个案例研究表明，布拉格鲁道夫芬的音乐思维并没有围绕法院或君主而来，也没有从法院或君主那里来。相反，鲁道夫二世最博学的科目通过聆听，唱歌和组成来理解自己与他人的关系。