Review: Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, by Tess Knighton and Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita

Abstract

Tess Knighton and Ascension Mazuela-Anguita, eds. Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018, 428 pp., 11 tables, 65 b/w illus. $82 (paper), ISBN 9782503579597 Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe is the most recent contribution to a growing academic literature on historical soundscapes. The book's twenty-one essays came out of a 2015 ICREA international workshop in Barcelona titled “Hearing the City: Musical Experience as Portal to Urban Soundscapes,” which explored European urban soundscapes from 1500 to 1800. More than forty cross-disciplinary scholars met to discuss historical urban soundscapes, with a particular emphasis on musical experience; thus it is perhaps not surprising that musicology dominates the volume's represented fields. The book is divided thematically into four parts: “Crossing Boundaries,” “Sounds in Contention: Musical Repertories and Genres in Contested Urban Spaces,” “Soundworlds and Spatial Strategies of the Social Elite,” and “Case Studies in Urban Soundscapes.” With each part comprising four to five essays and the whole bookended by an introduction and coda, the volume makes for a dense and information-laden read. Coeditor Tess Knighton, a leading expert on historical soundscapes and key organizer of the project, provides a foreword in which she discusses the 2015 workshop and preparations for the book. She gives an overview of each chapter, pointing to the salient aspects of the authors’ contributions as they relate to the study of sound in the past. Tim Carter's introduction then opens by asking, “How can we best study musical listening?” (26). Carter untangles the principal features of “listening communities” (33) in the past through what he terms “Historically Informed Listening,” an invented analytical category that seeks to attend both to those who made music and to those who experienced it (26). Citing case studies from the late Renaissance and early baroque Italy, Carter makes the larger claim that historians can constructively represent premodern soundscapes through deep readings of primary sources and familiarity with larger historical contexts. All of the core issues that Carter …