By the late-sixteenth century, Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the Holy Roman Empire, boasting an active musical life involving the contributions of musicians like Jacobus de Kerle, Hans Leo Hassler, and Gregor Aichinger. This musical culture, however, unfolded against a backdrop of looming religious schism. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, Augsburg was the largest 'biconfessional' city in the Empire, housing a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, ruled by a city government divided between the two faiths. The period 1580-1630 saw a gradual widening of the divide between these groups. The arrival of the Jesuits in the 1580s polarized the religious atmosphere and fueled the assertion of a Catholic identity, expressed in public devotional services, spectacular processions, and pilgrimages to local shrines. The Catholic music produced for these occasions both reflected and contributed to the religious divide. This book explores the relationship between music and religious identity in Augsburg during this period. How did 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' repertories diverge from one another? What was the impetus for this differentiation, and what effect did the circulation and performance of this music have on Augsburg's religious culture? These questions call for a new, cross-disciplinary approach to the music history of this era, one which moves beyond traditional accounts of the lives and works of composers, or histories of polyphonic genres. Using a wide variety of archival and musical documents, Alexander Fisher offers a holistic view of this musical landscape, examining aspects of composition, circulation, performance, and cultural meaning.

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.

That Johann Sebastian Bach is a pivotal figure in the history of Western music is hardly news, and the magnitude of his achievement is so immense that it can be difficult to grasp. In "About Bach," fifteen scholars show that Bach's importance extends from choral to orchestral music, from sacred music to musical parodies, and also to his scribes and students, his predecessors and successors. Further, the contributors demonstrate a diversity of musicological approaches, ranging from close studies of Bach's choices of musical form and libretto to wider analyses of the historical and cultural backgrounds that impinged upon his creations and their lasting influence. This volume makes significant contributions to Bach biography, interpretation, pedagogy, and performance.

Contributors are Gregory G. Butler, Jen-Yen Chen, Alexander J. Fisher, Mary Dalton Greer, Robert Hill, Ton Koopman, Daniel R. Melamed, Michael Ochs, Mark Risinger, William H. Scheide, Hans-Joachim Schulze, Douglass Seaton, George B. Stauffer, Andrew Talle, and Kathryn Welter.