Hearing the city in early modern Europe

Hearing the City is a major new contribution to the field of urban musicology in the early modern period with twenty-one essays by leading figures in the field from Europe, the USA and Australia. The urban soundscape is studied from a range of different interdisciplinary perspectives, and its scope is broad, from the major role of city minstrels in fifteenth-century Viennese urban identity to the civic problems presented by the location of opera houses in Enlightenment Naples. The individual contributions explore themes related to the complex relationships between sound and space within the urban context and between social identity and civic authorities and draw on a wide range of source material from city pay documents and legislation to contemporaneous accounts, correspondence, travel writing, religious and moral tracts, fictional writing and architectural legacy. Aspects of urban soundscapes both specific and common to Naples, Rome, Palermo, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Lisbon, London, Vienna, Hamburg and Zurich are analyzed in their broader socio-cultural contexts, as well as the dynamic networks between cities in Europe and beyond. These case studies are framed by Tim Carter's stimulating introduction to the development of historical urban sound studies and a coda in the form of a discussion as to how the results of urban musicology might be applied through a digital platform to reach beyond academic discourse to involve modern citizens in hearing the soundworlds of the past.

Introduction. Listening to music in early modern Italy : some problems for the urban musicologist / Tim Carter -- Crossing boundaries. Urban musicologies / Dinko Fabris ; Hearing other cities : the role of seaborne empires and colonial emporia in early global music history / David R.M. Irving ; Topography, sound and music in eighteenth-century Madrid / Juan José Carreras ; Sounding Shakespeare's London : the noisy politics of ceremonial entries / Bruce R. Smith ; Veiling the voice of architecture / Helen Hills -- Sounds in contention : musical repertories and genres in contested urban spaces. Sounds and silences of reformation : Zurich, 1524-71 / Jan-Friedrich Missfelder ; Musical experience in urban societies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries : communication, moral issues and musical townscape / Joachim Kremer ; Music as dangerous urban leisure : safety in and around public theatres in enlightenment Naples / Mélanie Traversier ; Shaping the urban soundscape in Spanish Palermo / Anna Tedesco ; Cantaron a no más, or musical changes in eighteenth-century Spain as constructed through Valencian relaciones de fiestas / Andrea Bombi -- Soundsworlds and spatial strategies of the social elite. The contribution of the Requestens noblewomen to the soundscape of sixteenth-century Barcelona through the Palau de la Comtessa / Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita ; Music in late seventeenth-century Rome : the Palazzo Orsini as a performance space / Anne-Madeleine Goulet ; The procession of the relics of São Roque (Lisbon, 1588) : a royal entry? / Ferrán Escrivà-Llorca ; Music regulations and sacred repertories in a ducal town without a duke : Francisco de los Cabos and the Sacra Capilla of El Salvador in sixteenth-century Úbeda / Javier Marín-López -- Case studies in urban soundscapes. On the soundscape of fifteenth-century Vienna / Reinhard Strohm ; Orality and aurality : contexts for the unwritten musics of sixteenth-century Barcelona / Tess Knighton ; Music, religious communities, and the urban dimension : sound experiences in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Ilaria Grippaudo ; Re-mapping urban music in Spanish regional contexts : the case of Navarre (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) / María Gembero-Ustárroz ; 'A vast number of voices and instruments' : the performance of large-scale church music in early eighteenth-century London / Peter Holman -- Coda. Historical soundscapes (c.1200-c.1800) : an on-line digital platform / Juan Ruiz Jiménez & Ignacio José Lizarán Rus.