This is the first music history monograph in the University of Virginia Press's Studies in Early Modern German History series, and one hopes it will not be the last. Opening with a vivid Leipzig soundscape from the imagined perspective of Johann Sebastian Bach's second wife Anna Magdalena, the social historian Tanya Kevorkian weaves a tapestry of music, sounds, and social life across five selected German cities and towns: Augsburg and Munich in the south, and Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig in north-central Germany. She moves within and beyond the more familiar elite urban spaces of court, church, and theater, “exploring the roles of townspeople of all status groups in music making” and the social functions music served in town life (5). Kevorkian shows how these five towns resounded—in the words of Geoffrey Baker—throughout the German Baroque era, which for Kevorkian extends from around 1650 to 1750 (the Thirty Years’ War to the Seven Years’ War). Bell ringers, tower guards, street vendors, night watchmen, tavern and coffeehouse players, and others turned cities themselves into “stages for music” (27). Building on her previous work on Leipzig—including in her 2007 book Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750—Kevorkian traces what she describes as “[s]ounds hovering between speech and song, signal and melody” (3), and also musical cultures that occupied the “vast middle ground between what is sometimes called ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture” (2–3). In doing so, Kevorkian offers a contribution to the burgeoning subdisciplines of early modern soundscape studies and urban musicology.
Why five towns? Kevorkian adopts a comparative approach to show the different ways local and regional networks emerged in the period following the Thirty Years’ War. As for why these five towns and not others nearby, Kevorkian does not say much, beyond their relatively large populations and commercial and political prominence in the Holy Roman Empire. Nor does Kevorkian indicate why she does not make more than passing reference to the intermediate city of Nuremberg, of roughly equal population to Augsburg and Leipzig in 1750, and an unavoidable stopping point for travelers between the two regions.
The first four chapters focus on groups of musicians, while the last three center on spaces and occasions of interaction. Chapter 1 traces the daily and seasonal cycles of sonic life in urban centers, as music and sound intersected with physical spaces and architecture in what Kevorkian describes as the “urban communicative web” (49). This is the only chapter to feature musical examples, including several composers’ approximations of timekeeping sounds. Chapters 2–4 focus on a dominant group of public musicians in Baroque German cities and towns: the musical tower guards, and the town musicians who emerged out of the position. The strenuous and often dangerous nature of tower guard jobs comes to light through petitions and other legal and civic records. Tower guards were also often assisted by their wives and children, resulting in records of paid women instrumentalists (78–80).
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on town musicians, frequently drawing on the Bach family as a case study. Many of Johann Sebastian Bach's ancestors were Stadtmusikanten active in Arnstadt and Erfurt (the position went by other names as well). Town musicians—not all of whom read music—were civic employees, had privileges to perform at weddings, banquets, and other occasions, and also played in church (90–91). Kevorkian surveys the training, networking, and appointment systems for town musicians, and the varying degrees to which cities adhered to the guild model. A contextualization of Bach's 1730 Entwurf einer wohlbestallten Kirchenmusik (99–100) offers new perspectives on this oft-cited document, and on possible subtexts for Bach's Cantata BWV 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen!, which was sung the following month.
Chapter 5 focuses on weddings, which were major sources of additional income for town musicians, not to mention key events in the life of a town or city. This chapter is perhaps the most accessible (and easily excerpted) in the book: the wedding traditions Kevorkian outlines are woven in expertly with the crucial role played by music in ceremonies and festivities, and in the social hierarchies these rituals enshrined. These in turn bear direct implications for our understanding of wedding cantatas and other occasional music by J. S. Bach, Johann Christoph Bach, and others, including occasional self-referential elements therein.
Chapter 6 sets outdoor and indoor spaces in conversation with one another, though the narrative is weighted quite heavily toward street music (busking, begging, serenades, nighttime processions, and student revelry) and its policing by town authorities, with church and opera seating practices and ambient sound an abbreviated afterthought. Chapter 7 revisits weddings, trade fairs, and other occasions where members of different confessions and faiths (Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish) interacted with one another, with members of court, and with inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. In her Conclusion, Kevorkian identifies some of the political, social, and technological factors that led to the decline of the town musicians and shifts in attitudes toward urban soundscapes after the Seven Years’ War, as well as their preservations as tourist relics to the present day.
In setting her archival materials front and center, Kevorkian's narrative occasionally meanders, with reiterations, abrupt pivots, and sometimes puzzling detours within and between chapters. Other pathways through the evidentiary record might have resulted in a more methodical approach to social functions of music, categories of musicians, and the like, or at least a clearer roadmap for the book as a whole. I was also left to wonder what roles traveling and resident theater companies played in the soundscapes of cities like Augsburg and Leipzig.
The book could also have benefited from more illustrations and musical examples. A map showing all five cities and towns, major routes between them, and surrounding cities and towns would have been a welcome complement to the individual maps included in the Introduction. Kevorkian often describes items of visual culture regarding instruments, ensembles, and rituals of urban life; including some of these as illustrations would have enriched the book, helping these descriptions come to life. I would have loved to see images of the Turmmusik and Stadtpfeifer ensembles and their instruments; major civic processions; the captivating 1691 Harmonische Baum, a tree-shaped wedding canon by Johann Theile (150); and the engraving of a rowdy serenade mentioned (but not reproduced) on pp. 170 and 172, which is not from “about 1626” but is rather from Andreas Bretschneider's 1617 Practicum Emblematicum (Leipzig, p. 38).
The same is true for music examples. It struck me as strange that an excerpt from Wagner's Die Meistersinger was one of just five music examples in the entire book, when so many other works from the period in question were described, but not shown. I would have welcomed reproductions of excerpts discussed by the author from Jauchzet Gott (106–108); or Johann Christoph Bach's 1676 wedding dialogue Meine Freundin, du bist schön, particularly its self-referential chorus “Esset, meine Lieben” (154–155); or the mocking imitation of beggars’ cries in Valentin Rathgeber's parody “Bettelzech” from the 1739 volume of his Augsburger Tafel-Confect (169).
The book's index was somewhat inconsistent: there were no entries for Dresden or Nuremberg, for instance, though these cities were mentioned several times each, and other cities beyond the main five did appear in the index (e.g. Arnstadt, Chemnitz, Halle). In addition, several names in the text did not make it into the index (e.g. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Christian Reuter, Gottfried Taubert).
Nevertheless, Kevorkian marshals an impressive range of archival and secondary sources to produce a vibrant—or rather “noisy,” in the best sense of the word—account of German Baroque musical life, from barrel organ players to court timpanists to rowdy students “howling like dogs and cats” late at night (171). The new insights on numerous details of J. S. Bach's biography and occasional music alone makes this book an important resource even for traditionalist Baroque music scholars. Beyond that, Kevorkian makes a compelling case for how Bach, Telemann, and their contemporaries were deeply embedded in the urban soundscapes of their day. Equally worthy of our attention are the many lesser-known or entirely anonymous musical laborers and “[i]ndividuals from all social groups [who] built this musical culture” (217).
