Anleitung zur musikalischen Setzkunst

The book is in German. But here is a short summary in English:

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's (1690-1749) “apprenticeship and traveling years” led from the grammar school in Gera from 1707 to study in Leipzig. From a young age he was known all over Europe and maintained contact with famous musicians such as Antonio Vivaldi. Between 1719 and 1749 Stölzel lived in Gotha and worked as a conductor. For some contemporaries, the reputation of his work exceeded that of his Leipzig colleague Johann Sebastian Bach.

While Stölzel's importance as a composer is increasingly coming back into focus today, little attention has been paid to the fact that he played an important role as a music theorist in his time.

This is where the present work comes in: For the first time, Stölzel's “Instructions for the Art of Musical Typesetting”, which has only survived in a single copy from the second half of the 18th century, is made accessible in an annotated edition and subjected to a detailed investigation. The question is in which context Stölzel's writing came about and what impulses his theoretical work provided for the further development of music theory in German-speaking countries: It is Stölzel who, with the "autonomization" of the diminished and excessive triad, opens the door to that understanding of a scale-based triad order, from which the modern stage theory emerges.

Reading Stölzel's “Instructions” leads us to the origins of modern harmony theory, which we are so familiar with in everyday practice.

Florian Vogt's fundamental work was accepted as a dissertation at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Freiburg in 2016.