Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound--including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony--not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries.

Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

Alexander J. Fisher's profile page

Alexander J. Fisher is Associate Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A musicologist specializing in music, sound, and religious culture in early modern Europe, he teaches courses in early music and coordinates the university's Early Music Ensemble.

"In this book, musicologist Alexander Fisher gives us an ear-opening account of the soundscape of early modern Bavaria. Music is his chief concern and, as well as the prolific and central outpit of Orland di Lasso (died Munich, 1594), he looks at the work of lesser-known composers, hymn writers, song collectors, street performers, and pamphlet publishers. But he casts a wide net, taking in bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, cheering, bells, gunfire, and cannon. Fisher's aim is to bring together musicology and soundscape studies to inquire into the way sound gives shape to space and identity."

--Renaissance and Reformation

"[Alexander] Fisher has written a fascinating, richly detailed, and exceedingly well-documented study. By employing the conceptual framework of the soundscape he opts for a contextually broad and inclusive examination of musi cand music making in Counter-Reformation Bavaria...the reader will likely focus on the richness of concepts, repertories, and published and archival sources that have been brought to light in this remarkable study. Certainly this book will prove foundational for further study of music in Bavaria during this time of religious reexamination and confessional consolidation."

--Journal of the American Musicological Society

"This book is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on soundscapes[.]"

-Sixteenth Century Journal