Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe presents the results of the ICREA International Workshop “Hearing the City: Musical Experience as Portal to Urban Soundscapes,” held in 2015 in Barcelona. Issued by Brepols's excellent Épitome musical series, the volume provides readers with an impressive interdisciplinary exhumation of the rich sonic textures of early modern soundworlds. The twenty-one essays collected here draw on diverse archival source materials and provide a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from microhistories, sonic archaeologies, spatial mapping, Geertzian thick descriptions, and sensory histories, to deepen understandings of the aural experiences and acoustemologies of preindustrial Europe. The book encompasses a spectrum of disciplinary perspectives and explores the historical urban soundscapes of a multitude of cities, from London to Lisbon, and Vienna to Valencia, among many others.

Tim Carter introduces the volume by laying the foundations for a programmatic inquiry into the social and historical conditions of early modern listening. The book is then organized into five sections, the first of which brings essays together under the theme of “Crossing Boundaries.” These essays explore the movement of musical concepts, practices, and repertories across the borders of Europe and beyond (through global networks of trade and colonialism), and across the disciplinary boundaries of architectural history and musicology. The second section, “Sounds in Contention,” explores the role of sound in the shaping of contested urban spaces. The essays in this section examine various ways in which the urban soundscape was reorganized toward different religious and civic ends. The silence of bells is shown to be equally as meaningful as their ringing in Reformation Zurich, while social and class conflict arises with the popularization of opera from the late seventeenth century onward in Hamburg, Naples, and Palermo. In the third section, “Soundworlds and Spatial Strategies of the Social Elite,” the relationship between music, space, and power is analyzed. Palace festivities, ephemeral theaters, processions, ceremonies, and other spectacular events brought sound and space together in ostentatious displays of wealth, image, prestige, and hegemony. By excavating the sonic politics at work in the sound-space relations of preindustrial cities, the soundscape emerges as key terrain for the power and prestige of the elite. The fourth section is comprised of a variety of case studies, arranged in chronological order from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. These provide detailed sonic snapshots of the historic urban soundscapes and acoustic communities of Vienna, Barcelona, Palermo, Navarre, and London.

The volume closes with a coda in which the developers of the digital platform Historical Soundscapes discuss the opportunities for hearing the past presented by new digital-humanities tools. This substantial online resource provides users with a variety of ways for engaging with historical sounds, including interactive maps that trace the routes of processions and events. The portal is one of a growing number of digital projects that promise to bring us closer to what Margaret Bent termed “authentic listening,” and what Shai Burstyn—following Michael Baxandall—called the “period ear.” Two key themes running across this rich collection of essays are the co-constitutive and entangled architectonics of sound and space and the evental politics of urban musical performances. The volume also invites us to better distinguish between registers of early modern urban sound, such as music, speech, and human/nonhuman noise, and to further explore distinctions between practices of hearing and listening.

This book thus powerfully demonstrates that any consideration of early modern musical cultures must also include the performative spaces and social practices related to or shaped by sound, as well as the experiences of those who listened to or heard those sounds. Taking readers through the time spaces of historic houses, churches, theaters, and city streets, the essays collected here capture the multifaceted dimensions of early modern aurality, providing perhaps the most significant collection of essays to date on the subject of sound in early modern cities. The volume does not only offer a varied sampling of current approaches to historical soundscapes but also sketches valuable directions in which to take future scholarship. An important contribution to broader scholarly trajectories exploring the multisensorial experiences of early modern worlds, it promises to become essential reading for all those who wish to embark on historical soundscape studies.