Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany - (Studies in Early Modern German History) by Tanya Kevorkian (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A deeply researched account of musical culture in five early modern German cities (Augsburg, Erfurt, Gotha, Leipzig, and Munich) offering a new narrative of Baroque music, one that defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. As Kevorkian demonstrates, musicians were much more closely integrated into urban society in the course of their educations, performances, and careers than has since become the case"--

Book Synopsis

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany offers a new narrative of Baroque music, accessible to non-music specialists, in which Tanya Kevorkian defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. Towns were crucial sites of music-making. Kevorkian explores how performance was integrated into and indispensable to everyday routines, celebrations such as weddings, and political culture. Training and funding likewise emerged from and were integrated into urban life. Ordinary artisans, students, and musical tower guards as well as powerful city councilors contributed to the production and reception of music. This book illuminates the processes at play in fascinating ways.

Challenging ideas of "elite" and "popular" culture, Kevorkian examines five central and southern German towns--Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig--to reconstruct a vibrant urban musical culture held in common by townspeople of all ranks. Outdoor acoustic communication, often hovering between musical and nonmusical sound, was essential to the functioning of these towns. As Kevorkian shows, that sonic communication was linked to the music and musicians heard in homes, taverns, and churches. Early modern urban environments and dynamics produced both the giants of the Baroque era, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, and the music that townspeople heard daily. This book offers a significant rediscovery of a rich, unique, and understudied musical culture.

Received a subvention award from the Margarita M. Hanson Fund and the Donna Cardamone Jackson Fund of the American Musicological Society.

Review Quotes

[A] vigorously researched, resonantly detailed, and often tuneful book . . . often entertaining and always thought-provoking.-- "Austrian History Yearbook"

[A] learned and provocative new book.-- "Journal of Modern History"

Kevorkian explores the sonic world of the early modern German city as a means of understanding music in and as a reflection of social life of the time. . . Curiously, the picture of musical life--in the cities in which Bach, his multigenerational family of town and court musicians, and their contemporaries lived and worked--offers abundant demonstration of its remoteness from lived experiences today.-- "Notes"

Fascinating and finely grained . . . Underlying the lucid prose of Kevorkian's account is a rich fabric of painstakingly thorough archival research and a very broad array of secondary literature. She reads the data with a particularly compassionate eye . . . Kevorkian's book is a valuable backdrop that provides new depth and dimensionality to our understanding of the music of Baroque Germany.-- "Early Music America"

This is a social history that is alive with quotidian detail and buzzes with the daily experiences of what feels to be a not-so-distant past. The prose in this accessible volume belies the immense primary-source research that informs it. . . . [A] rich picture of baroque German life.-- "BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute"

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany documents in wonderful detail how the various layers of society during this period (mostly after the Thirty Years War until ca. 1750) and geographical area (data gleaned mainly from the cities of Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig) were saturated with musical and nonmusical sound... As the reader traverses each chapter, there begins to form an imaginary mental picture very similar to an immense and complex spider web, wherein the thousands of musical interactions form points, each of which are connected by multiple strands to other nodes... I thoroughly enjoyed this eminently readable study.

-- "H-German"

A truly exceptional book. Kevorkian has produced a rich, lively, readable history that extends and upends our knowledge of this period. This is a very important contribution to the study of music and society in Germany, at a time when the medieval and modern intersected and one can see the old world still functioning and a new one coming into being.

--Celia Applegate, Vanderbilt University, author of The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme

Embraces a variety of approaches to urban history and musicology, which let Kevorkian tell a lively story about overlooked professions, vividly reconstructing aspects of everyday life and music making in Bach's age.

-- "Bach Notes"

Grounded in solid and extensive archival research, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany examines the myriad ways in which music was embedded in the everyday lives of early modern townspeople. From taverns and town halls to churches and guard towers, from weddings and funerals to street fairs and processions, Tanya Kevorkian's fascinating study shows how music could both connect and divide urban communities. Musicologists and social historians alike will profit from her careful and revealing exploration of musical culture in five German cities

--James Van Horn Melton, Emory University, Author of The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe

Tanya Kevorkian's meticulous yet readable social history of the urban soundscapes in Augsburg, Erfurt, Leipzig, Munich, and other German towns allows us to imagine what Bach, Telemann, and their contemporaries heard on a daily basis - a sonic tapestry that included not just cantatas in church, instrumental pieces at concerts, and dances in taverns, but also night watchmen's songs, street vendors' cries, tower guards' brass fanfares and hymns, and postal coachmen's horn calls. Drawing on a wealth of previously overlooked documents, Kevorkian deftly outlines the complexities and conflicts of musicians' daily lives: the physical rigors faced by tower guards, the often fraught business of weddings, so crucial to the livelihoods of town musicians and their lower-status competitors, and the controversial street-singing of schoolboys, university students, and beggars. Thanks to this stimulating book, we hear baroque Germany in new and deeper ways.

--Steven D. Zohn, Temple University, Author of Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's Instrumental Works

About the Author

Tanya Kevorkian is Associate Professor of History at Millersville University and author of Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750.