This study follows logically from Fisher's first book, Music and religious identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Aldershot 2004), although the geographical scope and breadth of subjects treated is here impressively expanded. In place of a specialised study of the impact of confessionalisation on musical life, Fisher strives in this book to recreate the sound of one of the German empire's largest territories. It is not just music, in other words, that is his subject, but the soundscape – choirs, pilgrimage songs, tavern singing, bells, gunfire, drums, chanting and the liturgy – that forms his subject. The inspiration for this study thus lies in works like Reinhard Strohm's Music in late medieval Bruges (Oxford 1985) or Bruce Smith's The acoustic world of early modern England (Chicago 1999). Fisher's scholarly contribution has less to offer in the way of a new theoretical perspective on the subject of soundscape, than it does authoritative research and sensible conclusions. It offers as well much excellent commentary about the many different kinds of music and sounds that coexisted in early modern Bavaria and the ways in which these contested, affirmed and propagandised for Catholicism. The voluminous research necessary to accomplish these tasks is evident on every page and the result is an exemplary and authoritative book that should inspire others to similar works of reconstruction.

Fisher's earlier study demonstrated that the simultaneous coexistence of Lutheranism and Catholicism in Augsburg had been one of the motors of the town's musical creativity. Bavaria, by contrast, was a single confessional state that had only small minorities of Protestants, but here, too, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of enormous musical creativity. Music came to play a role as propaganda for a resurgent Catholicism, even as Catholics and Protestants sometimes relied on the singing of prohibited hymns and songs as a form of protest or dissent. Throughout the period the territory also proved to be a fertile ground for musical styles imported from elsewhere. Late medieval Burgundian polyphony, for instance, continued to live on in the region's wealthy monasteries in a kind of autumn tide, while newer innovations in church music from Venice and elsewhere in Italy inspired composers working in Bavaria's public churches. The 1605 requirement that all Catholic parishes adopt the prescribed Roman rite, moreover, did not dampen, but rather encouraged the development of new music, as did the expansion of counter-reforming orders like the Jesuits and the newly founded Marian congregations and confraternities. Beyond church walls a rich civic life of urban processions, feast days and pilgrimage came to fill outdoor spaces with the sounds of Catholic worship and devotion. Fisher deftly examines these subjects and more in a highly readable style that is free of jargon, but which does not sacrifice musicological precision.

At the same time, his book has much to say to specialists working on early modern religion. Fisher is well aware of the discontents that many historians now have with the confessionalisation thesis, yet he realises that Bavaria was one of the more effectively and persistently Catholicised regions in the empire. Thus his work sensibly redeems those portions of confessionalisation theory that are applicable to music and the early modern soundscape: its emphasis on religion as an vehicle for cultural differentiation and production, its focus on competition as a motor for creating ever more finely tuned distinctions between Lutheranism, Calvinism and Catholicism, and its concentration on the importance that disciplining and social control played in religious and social life in the course of the seventeenth century. At the same time he is well aware that the ‘top-down’ or ‘two-tiered’ model that many confessionalisation historians once adopted to treat the origins of religious differences and the sources of cultural productivity are inadequate to describe the complexity of change in the early modern world.

To treat these intricacies, Fisher devotes the bulk of his study to a series of five case studies examining the deployment of sound and music in the various localities, churches, urban spaces and country lanes of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bavaria. First, Fisher examines sound in Bavaria's major public churches, giving special attention to the newly constructed churches of the Jesuit Order, particularly St Michael's in Munich and St Ignatius in Landshut and also to the territory's largest parish churches and Freising Cathedral. Subsequent chapters treat the soundscapes of devotional life, of the civic sphere, of processions, and of pilgrimage. There is thus something present here in these pages that will fascinate anyone with an interest in music or religion, especially so since the text is filled with so many specifics about performance practice and the mechanics of staging the territory's largest religious spectacles. For the consecration of the Jesuit's newly completed St Michael's Church in Munich in 1597, for example, the festivities began at 4 a.m. with the tolling of an enormous bronze bell and a fireworks display. The services that followed were kicked off by an imposing procession of the Host, accompanied by instrumentalists who vied against interludes from drummers and trumpeters. When the service began, five separate choirs positioned throughout the church provided musical accompaniment, while afterwards a banquet was held to feed the 1,500 guests. Still, the festivities did not end here, for an eight-hour theatrical, Triumphus Divi Michaelis Archangeli, entertained the entire town in the open air for the remainder of the day with an imposing allegory about the victories of Catholicism. Details like these vividly support one of Fisher's central contentions – that a consideration of the orchestration of soundscape needs to be integrated more pervasively into our accounts of early modern religion. For, as he shows, only sound possessed the ability to permeate church walls and to spill over into urban spaces and the countryside. In this process the soundscape of early modern Catholic Bavaria possessed the ability to sacralise spaces far beyond church altars.