Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany by Tanya Kevorkian (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany by Tanya Kevorkian Janette Tilley (bio) Tanya Kevorkian. Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022). 336 pp. For the past half century or so, early music studies have predominantly oriented themselves toward musical recreation. How well equipped we are today to hear with ears attuned to these antique sounds is a question that has recently come to the fore, and with it, investigations into the broader historical sonic world. Tanya Kevorkian's new volume contributes to this broadening of scope of historical sound studies to investigate the urban musical (and not so musical) landscape of baroque Germany. A methodology and theoretical framework for this work was established by Canadian sound studies pioneers Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer, who founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s. Over the course of several decades, their research, recording, and creative project married emergent concerns about the state of the environment, both physical and aural, with technology to produce an electroacoustic record of time and space. Project participants were often composers, gathering field recordings, documenting change, and creating innovative works, including site-specific experiences and sound walks, radio programs, and electroacoustic compositions. Composer and early project member Hildegard Westerkamp helped raise the international profile of soundscape studies with the founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and its publications, the Soundscape Newsletter (1991–1999), WFAE Newsletter (2004–2015), and Soundscape—The Journal of Acoustic Ecology (2000–2019; 2023–present), for which she served as editor until 2012. That it would take some fifty years for fruitful intradisciplinary products to emerge is perhaps not surprising, given the siloed workings of musicology (and historical musicology, especially) from the creative branches of musical research.1 A landmark international [End Page 309] workshop in 2015, "Hearing the City: Musical Experience as Portal to Urban Soundscapes," sponsored by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) in Barcelona, examined early modern urban soundscapes and brought the study of acoustic ecology to prominence within early modern musicological studies.2 A year earlier, Alexander J. Fisher framed an examination of urban public musical culture in Counter-Reformation Bavaria with some of the analytical tools that Truax and Schafer had first conceived, and it appears to be this study to which Tanya Kevorkian owes the greatest debt in her book on early modern German music and urban life.3 But while Fisher's study is clearly rooted in musicological traditions, exploring sacred processions, bells, song, and the like, Kevorkian brings a social historian's lens to sound study, exploring the sonic signaling—loud, performative, musical, or military—that filled the ears of early modern German townspeople. The scope of study, title notwithstanding, is a relatively narrow geographical region of Germany encompassing five towns in the South and central-Eastern regions. Augsburg and Munich, Bavarian towns with starkly different civic and religious circumstances in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, remind us that geographic proximity does not guarantee social similarity, for a variety of historical, geopolitical, and religious reasons. Augsburg, a biconfessional Imperial town whose historical import waned after the midseventeenth century, remained something of a small regional town rather than a regional powerhouse and contrasts sharply with Munich, the seat of electoral power and a Catholic stronghold. A little farther north, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig in modern Thuringia and Saxony again highlight how local religious, political, and economic forces shaped the sonic landscape. Erfurt, like Augsburg, was a small biconfessional town that remained something of a backwater in the eighteenth century, while Gotha, a ducal residence, provides [End Page 310] a glimmer of regional court-civic life. Leipzig, that regional powerhouse of Saxony with its trade fairs, university, and of course churches, is so well documented as to be a cornerstone of any sonic analysis of German civic life. The selection of towns along this Thuringia-Saxon corridor also affords Kevorkian the opportunity to explore several members of the extended Bach family, who presided over civic musical life in their respective towns for generations. Kevorkian has opted not to include the vastly different northern regions of the Hanseatic free cities...