Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City ed. by Marie-Alexis Colin, Iain Fenlon, and Matthew Laube

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City ed. by Marie-Alexis Colin, Iain Fenlon, and Matthew Laube Paul G. Feller-Simmons Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City. Edited by Marie-Alexis Colin, Iain Fenlon, and Matthew Laube. (Collection "Épitome musical.") Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. [ 312 p. ISBN 9782503598871 (paperback), €70; ISBN 9782503598888 (e-book), €55.] Music examples, tables, illustrations, index. The essay collection Theatres of Belief is the result of a collaborative project between a transnational group of musicologists who share interest in the convergence of religion, sound, and early modern urban spaces. Eleven chapters by different authors provide multiple case studies drawn from cities located in Europe and the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These studies showcase a variety of approaches to religious confession, conversion, and soundscape. A leading thread of this volume is interactions between sound and confessionalization in the early modern world. In this regard, the authors' tendency to eschew the overarching narratives that have conflated local experience with universal developments related to religious change is a potentially generative model. Many chapters demonstrate how confessionalization traversed dynamic and distinctly localized trajectories. For instance, Philip Hahn considers the incremental introduction of Lutheran music culture in Ulm following its Reformation in 1531. The chapter advances that the city became an exemplary case of a long, acoustic Reformation. Lutheran theologians tried to introduce church [End Page 395] musical practices in a way that conflicted with Ulm's Zwinglian history and thus repeatedly found resistance. Hahn then challenges a unidirectional model for the cultural development of the Reformation that has tended to sideline the realities of sacred music in many regions of central Europe. In discussing the distinction between opposition to musical performance in urban and rural areas surrounding Ulm, Hahn addresses issues of sonic conversion between social boundaries. In a state of pluriform religious cultures, sacred music served to "experience and express religious belonging" (p. 169). Alexander Fisher also explores the role that sound and music played in the strategies of conversion of confessional spaces in southern Germany. Fisher focuses on sonic conversions within worship spaces and the reconfiguration of space particularly delimited by bell signals, processions, and popular singing. Whereas Protestants demarcated confessional boundaries through the sounding of sermons in the vernacular and congregational singing, Catholics responded by producing orthodox songs for the laity and reconfiguring church architecture. As Hahn shows to be the case in Ulm, Fisher demonstrates that polemics surrounding the control of the soundscape were rooted in confessional politics that functioned as markers of social identity. For example, while processions in Catholic locations such as Munich sacralized the public space, they could also serve as a medium of religious confrontation and negotiation. The sonic conversion of physical structures and the interdependence of landscape and soundscape features most strongly in Iain Fenlon's contribution. He provides a chronological exposition of the Christianization of Cordova, Spain, through architectural, ritual, and musical conversions between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the wake of the reconquista, the construction of a cathedral and royal chapel on the site of the old mosque and the reorganization of the liturgy and music chapel forcefully changed the urban soundscape. Echoing ideas developed by Hahn and Fisher, Fenlon proposes that public music and ritual were functional to displaying Catholic identity and monarchical loyalty in Cordova. In this instance, polyphony performed by the musical forces of the cathedral's chapel gained growing importance in processions throughout the sixteenth century. This "spectacular display of civic and religious belief" (p. 60) thus provided a sonified distinguishability to Catholic devotional identity. Emilio Ros-Fábregas also illustrates how sonic practices identify a Catholic community, albeit in the form of networks interconnected through devotional practices. His chapter focuses on a 1661 publication of Jesuit spiritual exercises dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament based on the traditions of Perpignan and Barcelona. The source provides details about the music that accompanied these exercises and includes an unexpected reference to Juan de Palafox y Mendoza that leads Ros-Fábregas to propose a further connection to Madrid. The chapter frames the source as a key to understanding the extent of the international...