This engaging book is a welcome contribution to Andean history, colonial urban history and the social history of music generally. At its most basic, Baker's book puts the music back into colonial Cusco: the church bells, the drums and trumpets of religious fiestas, a sackcloth procession singing dirges for a dead queen. The subject is church music, the colonial masses, hymns, villancicos and marches of Catholic ritual and institutional life. The book is not a musical analysis, however, but a social history. The notorious impregnability of Cusco's cathedral and monastery archives necessarily guides the direction of the work, and there is scant discussion of the music itself. Rather, Baker has made excellent use of the departmental and episcopal archives to provide a richly detailed discussion of music makers and listeners, and the role music played in daily and public life.

As a strong introductory discussion reminds us, music not only featured everywhere in daily practice, but also served widely as a metaphor, thoughtfully elaborated, for civic life and colonial rule. The harmonious ideal depended on the stifling of many voices, and, as in any early modern city, by no means were the audible willing to blend peacefully. Above all, the Church was the domain of Spanish colonial music, often sung, played, heard and written by native Andeans, but always in fundamentally European styles and genres. Its strains emanated from the Church's many institutions and served to bind, if often discordantly, cathedral and seminary, secular and regular, male and female. The young of elite and literate Cusco were educated in those institutions, where music formed them culturally and in their self-disciplining. As Kathryn Burns demonstrated so well, those institutions were also central to the cultural and political life of Cusco, and music played a part in almost all of their public and social interactions with the secular world. More narrowly, composers, organists and choirmasters formed part of the human traffic that bound this world together. Throughout the book, graceful miniatures of these individuals, and useful institutional histories, explore how they and their music permeated all aspects of life in the city.

The latter half of the book discusses church music in Cusco's urban parishes and the rural reducciones. The treatment is welcome, both because the social history of Cusco's indigenous parishes remains little studied, and for elaborating how crucial music was in establishing and negotiating the hierarchies of rural and indigenous colonial society. Music was understood as central both to the colonial project and governance, and to the rich indigenous culture that developed out of Toledo's reform of the old Inca heartland and the Aymara societies to the south. (The odd scholar of rural Cusco might wish for greater attention to the variety and nuances within that region, but that is a picky complaint.) Through coercive extraction and willing gift, musical rituals consumed a notable portion of the surplus that these small agricultural and pastoral communities managed to generate each year. The parish's musical officers were drawn from, and constituted a sizeable portion of, a village's prominent figures; music was at the core of the duties and performances of the cofradías that were in turn at the heart of rural life. And, of course, this was the music of Spanish, Catholic imperialism, resonating ambivalently at the heart of the pueblo. Again, musical specialists constituted an important and heretofore overlooked group in the migratory world of the colonial Andes, moving from community to community and helping to forge a shared musical and religious culture.

This fine study could have been more broadly directed. The focus on church music largely eliminates discussion of the role of both indigenous and popular music (although not the musicians); popular reception, too, could be more robustly addressed. In all, one is left straining to hear the din of the chichería and the village wedding celebration. Sources certainly limit such enquiry, but Manuel Burga, Gary Tomlinson and Carolyn Dean have engaged similar questions well; greater use could also have been made of the albeit small and problematic body of Quechua theatre, as well as contemporary creole poetry, sermons and so on. Also, while treating Cusco from Toledo to Independence as a more or less static entity is quite tenable, the author might have offered conclusions on temporal change that more aggressively linked narratives of music to larger economic and social trends. Given the polyphony of colonial Cusco, however, a rigorously chronological melody could well have spoiled the delightful harmony of this work.