A truly exceptional book. Kevorkian has produced a rich, lively, readable history that extends and upends our knowledge of this period. This is a very important contribution to the study of music and society in Germany, at a time when the medieval and modern intersected and one can see the old world still functioning and a new one coming into being.
Celia Applegate, Vanderbilt University, author of The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme
Grounded in solid and extensive archival research, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany examines the myriad ways in which music was embedded in the everyday lives of early modern townspeople. From taverns and town halls to churches and guard towers, from weddings and funerals to street fairs and processions, Tanya Kevorkian?s fascinating study shows how music could both connect and divide urban communities. Musicologists and social historians alike will profit from her careful and revealing exploration of musical culture in five German cities
James Van Horn Melton, Emory University, Author of The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
Tanya Kevorkian?s meticulous yet readable social history of the urban soundscapes in Augsburg, Erfurt, Leipzig, Munich, and other German towns allows us to imagine what Bach, Telemann, and their contemporaries heard on a daily basis ? a sonic tapestry that included not just cantatas in church, instrumental pieces at concerts, and dances in taverns, but also night watchmen?s songs, street vendors? cries, tower guards? brass fanfares and hymns, and postal coachmen?s horn calls. Drawing on a wealth of previously overlooked documents, Kevorkian deftly outlines the complexities and conflicts of musicians? daily lives: the physical rigors faced by tower guards, the often fraught business of weddings, so crucial to the livelihoods of town musicians and their lower-status competitors, and the controversial street-singing of schoolboys, university students, and beggars. Thanks to this stimulating book, we hear baroque Germany in new and deeper ways.
Steven D. Zohn, Temple University, Author of Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works
This is a social history that is alive with quotidian detail and buzzes with the daily experiences of what feels to be a not-so-distant past. The prose in this accessible volume belies the immense primary-source research that informs it. . . . [A] rich picture of baroque German life.
BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute
Embraces a variety of approaches to urban history and musicology, which let Kevorkian tell a lively story about overlooked professions, vividly reconstructing aspects of everyday life and music making in Bach?s age.
Bach Notes
Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany documents in wonderful detail how the various layers of society during this period (mostly after the Thirty Years War until ca. 1750) and geographical area (data gleaned mainly from the cities of Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig) were saturated with musical and nonmusical sound... As the reader traverses each chapter, there begins to form an imaginary mental picture very similar to an immense and complex spider web, wherein the thousands of musical interactions form points, each of which are connected by multiple strands to other nodes... I thoroughly enjoyed this eminently readable study.
H-German
Fascinating and finely grained . . . Underlying the lucid prose of Kevorkian's account is a rich fabric of painstakingly thorough archival research and a very broad array of secondary literature. She reads the data with a particularly compassionate eye . . . Kevorkian's book is a valuable backdrop that provides new depth and dimensionality to our understanding of the music of Baroque Germany.
Early Music America
