Studies of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century music in Bavaria tend to revolve around the key personalities and institutions of that fervent time: Orlando di Lasso and his sonorous polyphony; the patronage and opulent courts of the Wittelsbach Dukes Albrecht V, Wilhelm V, and Maximilian I, the great defender of Catholicism; as well as the ambitious and far-reaching Society of Jesus. Alexander J. Fisher broadens the picture by considering the many places where music—and sound in general—participated in that period's great religious turmoil and the entrenchment of Catholicism in oft-contested regions.

Fisher aligns his study of Bavaria's sonic world with other recent contributions to the history of sensory experience that seek to construct a more embodied understanding of culture and past experience. Constance Classen's work on the sense of smell (Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell [1994]) and A. Roger Ekirch's book about the experience of night (At Day's Close: Night in Times Past [2005]) are two important models. Fisher's study of the acoustic environment of historical cultures also owes much to two different historiographical trends: he explicitly credits one of these, whereas the other is a tacit thread in recent musicological scholarship. With respect to the first, Fisher points out his debt to the ideas of sound “ecologists” and, in particular, to the pioneering work of composer R. Murray Schafer, who coined the term soundscape to refer broadly to the totality of sonic events in a specific location. Schafer's “World Soundscape Project,” which began in the mid-1960s, sought ways in which artists, scholars, and scientists could raise awareness of the great variety of aural experiences in urban and rural locations. The politically active arm of this project reached out to urban planners and civic leadership. Later scholars have taken the ideas of the “soundscape” in different directions: some focus on acoustic ecology, with obvious links to the modern environmental movement, psychology, urban experience, and acoustic cognition. In the humanities, historians, anthropologists, and musicologists have taken up the concept of the “soundscape” more broadly as a way of examining the aural landscape of past and contemporary cultures, and as a way of locating meaning within their acoustic utterances. The latter approach echoes more generally a widespread and tacit thread in musicology that seeks to study music- (and sound-) making in its larger social context as a communicative act. Bruce R. Smith's study of early modern England (The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor [1999]) takes this latter approach to sound much further than musicologists have, and serves as an important model for Fisher.

The connection of Music, Piety, and Propaganda with Smith's study—as with Schafer's work—is inspirational, not methodological, for Fisher is most concerned here with communicative and traditionally “musical” sounds; bell ringing, street singing, and complex polyphony make up the bulk of the aural landscape he considers in detail. The five central chapters of the book examine each of the various sites of sound production in Catholic Bavaria: from churches to smaller devotional spaces such as chapels and private homes, to the larger public sphere in the processionals, plays, and pilgrimages that enlivened Bavarian streets. In each of these chapters, Fisher situates conventional musical sounds next to more broadly conceived signals—to use the term coined by Schafer—which include consciously perceived aural markers such as bell ringing, gunfire, and whistles. The book explores how these sounds take on socially communicative roles to become “soundmarks,” in the language of Schafer's soundscape studies.

In the opening chapters, Fisher looks at the spaces in which sacred music resounded, from the high barrel-vaulted Church of St. Michael in Munich, to the intimate chapels of Bavaria's cloistered nuns, to the private devotional spaces of lay worshippers. Fisher evokes an image of great color in the variety of musical styles heard in these spaces—from chant, through the harmonized recitation known as falsobordone, to complex polyphony—and in the social fabric of those in attendance. The final three chapters consider ways in which sound and music transformed public spaces into devotional ones, as well as ways in which confessional allegiance was publicly enacted and enforced. Public veneration, such as that of the Mariensäule in Munich, reinforced Counter-Reformation theology with simple song, while processions (such as those celebrating Corpus Christi) brought together a host of sonic events—from the singing of litanies to the sounding of guns and cannon around the edges of Munich—as a way of defining both confessional and political identity. In the streets of Bavaria, public sounds, such as bells, not only regulated behavior—for instance, by dictating appropriate moments for prayer—but also extended the boundaries of sacred space.

As the book's tripartite title suggests, piety and propaganda are another central focus. A survey of printed musical sources, visitation records, and chronicles, alongside court and other official documents, reveals how intertwined these two elements were, particularly in the newly re-catholicized regions of Pfalz-Neuburg and the Upper Palatinate. Reports of heretical singing in homes, ordinances mandating the ringing of prayer bells (especially for Marian devotion), and attempts to curtail public sounds such as street singing and noisemaking are all evidence of the power sound had to disrupt, defy, and define confessional spaces.

Fisher brings together a great wealth of primary documents from the Bavarian archives of Munich, Regensburg, Deggendorf, Ingolstadt, and Amberg to construct a lively image of sound as a contested confessional and political arena. Thanks to digital publishing, many of Fisher's primary sources are available online. The “Companion Website”—which is not password protected, as the book's preface suggests—offers musical and German-language source material of interest primarily to scholars. References within the book to online “Extended References” are clearly noted and easily downloaded in a single 123-page pdf. Furthermore, eleven “extended musical examples” provide transcriptions of music from manuscript and print sources that go well beyond the typical musical example. With these complete musical transcriptions, performers are equipped to replicate at least some of the music that filled the early modern Bavarian soundscape.