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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 609-611



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Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Edited by Fiona Kisby (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 188pp. $59.95


It is high time that historians and musicologists (a.k.a. "music historians") start sharing ideas in an accessible language free of complex terminology and disciplinary jargon, while still providing keen insights into historical material. Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, which includes contributions by fourteen scholars from various fields, is a good step in that direction. Historians in music departments with interests in the early modern period are sure to benefit from the urban- history methods in it. (Doing so would not be unusual since musicologists have always drawn from disciplines such as history, literature, art history, and, in more recent times, sociology, psychology, and critical studies.) Historians in history departments, as well as interdisciplinary scholars from many other fields, however, would also appreciate the volume, which has much to say about the cultural/artistic milieus of the times, places, and peoples of traditional historical inquiry.

Kisby's introduction seeks to justify the project of uniting urban history and musicology, which could have been done without her occasionally argumentative tone. Her criticism of the Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History is convincing enough to justify the project. Only about 6 percent of the c. 20,000 entries in it deal with "culture," and "virtually none concerns music in towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe or indeed that of any time or place" (5).1 Urban historians have tended to focus on the origins of, and activities in, cities as well as the social consequences of urban living. Musicologists, meanwhile, have explored the history of music in specific geographical/political centers.2 Urban history offers musicology a more contextual approach, as opposed to the "fetishising [of] genres or institutions" that Kisby laments in the typical one-place model of musicology (6). Therefore, in selecting and editing her authors' contributions, Kisby has espoused the general scope and a few of the methods of urban history and applied them to musicological studies with the hope of offering some "culture" to urban historians and some new contextual methods to musicologists. [End Page 609]

The introduction sets the stage for the ensuing articles, but the message is better gleaned from reading the thirteen chapters that comprise the rest of the book. Each of the articles could be read separately, although reading in this way would miss the connections between them. Some of the common themes first appear in the opening article by Strohm, who examines the musical relationships between the institutions of the Austrian cities of Balzano, Innsbruck, and Vienna. Strohm recognizes and acknowledges the assumptions and prejudices of modern scholars: This "perspective ... refrains from conjecturing institutional and social parameters across all those spaces where transmission has simply denied us the details of life and thought. We really do not know what originally filled those spaces" (14). These two topics—institutional interrelatedness and the recognition of modern biases—recur in many of the later studies.

Various sub-themes appear throughout other articles. The topic of the Reformation arises in studies of cathedral music and politics in Dublin and of church music in north German towns during the sixteenth century. Because the latter study deals extensively with historiographical issues, it provides an approach that differs from the largely archival makeup of the other chapters. The professional lives of musicians are illuminated in an article about singers and scribes in Brussels' secular churches and in an excellent article on cathedral choirmen in England, from 1558 to 1649. Smaller-scale communities are the subject of studies on English parishes, the guilds of the small town of Louth, England, and the academic colleges and town of Oxford. A further chapter examines the silence of the archives regarding music in the burgh of Haddington, Scotland; another makes a comparison between three southern French cities (Montpellier, Toulouse, and Avignon) and their respective civic patronage. "Civic image" is the topic of a study that examines music and...

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