Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany, by Tanya Kevorkian

The title of Tanya Kevorkian’s book reflects the author’s attention to how music was integrated into urban life in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Germany. Music in urban environments has not received the same scholarly attention as music in religious institutions and courts, as much of this music-making existed only as part of an oral tradition. The author approaches this work with the lens of a social historian informed by the field of sound studies. The focus is not on the music itself or specific institutions, but rather on broadly defined music-making in the sonic landscape. The first chapter offers an overview of the nature of sonic performance in the city, including the sounds of guards, vendors and coachmen. The following three chapters address the professional activities, training and careers of musical tower guards and the town musicians who marked the soundscapes with regularity and meaning. The author dedicates a chapter to weddings, as they appear abundantly in the sources as highly controlled and socially revealing events at which musicians found important employment. Two final chapters consider questions of music-making in different types of spaces, including outdoor unofficial and official performances and indoor performances of opera and music in churches, as well as how these activities intersected with religion, countryside and courts. Through this organisation of the book, the author establishes how townspeople experienced music and ‘shared an acoustic world’, regardless of social status.

This book is based upon extensive and diverse archival records and contemporary printed works. This type of scholarship is based on hundreds of scattered fragmentary sources that need to be methodically pieced together to create a meaningful picture. It can be a challenging task to step back from the hundreds of records and create both a coherent image and a readable text, and Kevorkian does a masterful job in this process. Her success at weaving music-making and stories of individual musicians into the broader patterns of urban history helps the reader imagine an interconnected musical life. While consideration of musical compositions is not the focus of this study, she incorporates a Bach cantata and other individual pieces into the narrative, and in the introduction, she provides five musical examples that reflect the sounds of the city. Extensive footnotes reveal the extensive research that underlies this study.

As clearly established in her introduction, Kevorkian focuses on five cities—Augsburg and Munich in southern Germany and Erfurt, Gotha and Leipzig in central Germany—choices that allow for a fascinating intersection with the Bach family. Her intention is clearly not to offer an overview that applies to all of Germany, and as she acknowledges, music-making was distinct from city to city. Undoubtedly, the picture would be significantly different in other locations in Germany. She does not subdivide the book by cities, but rather interweaves examples and patterns from the five cities into broader topics. Because music has been such a strong marker of social status, distinctive political histories of cities result in distinctive musical histories. Sounds conveyed political significance that would have been understood by the townspeople. The same musical fanfare could mean something very different from city to city based upon details of the sound. Besides the skills of the musicians, variation in the types of instruments or instrumentation would have resulted in a different meaning. The sound of a trumpet could capture and convey decades of political history. The author makes important points concerning the interconnectedness of music and politics throughout the book. For example, she notes how the proximity of a territorial ruler affected urban music-making or how ‘the city trumpeters of imperial free cities were the peers of court trumpeters’. Because of the book’s organisation, important distinctions between towns are blended in with broader patterns.

This book will have a strong appeal to a diverse audience. Kevorkian’s integrated and narrative style offers accessibility to the general reader. While written from a broad historical and sociological perspective, it offers value to the musicologist. It offers a strong model of situating ‘music and musicians in a broad spectrum of social relations and interactions’. The work is also relevant to scholars interested in earlier time periods and different geographic areas in Europe. For example, many of the musical activities and patterns described in Baroque German cities are evident in late medieval French cities, but with more documentation available from this later period, it is possible to fill in a picture in a way not feasible for earlier settings. The book allows for the recognition of similar practices of urban music-making over centuries in different regions in Europe. Kevorkian has offered an important study that pulls together the various contributors from all social groups to musical life in German cities, and as she emphasises in the conclusion, the musical culture they created ‘was held in common across status lines’.