Music and Society in Early Modern England

Comprehensive, lavishly illustrated survey of English popular music during the early modern period. Accompanied by specially commissioned recordings.

Christopher Marsh (Author)

9781107610248, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 May 2013

624 pages, 58 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 3.2 cm, 1.1 kg

'In this important new book Christopher Marsh uncovers the variety of music made and heard in early modern England … [It] will surely prompt new ideas from historians and scholars of literature, theatre, music, and material culture. As recreation, as worship, as social comment and social mediation, or simply as fun, music was enmeshed in English culture at all levels and in many ways. Marsh's book provides a remarkable opportunity to eavesdrop on this neglected dimension of early modern English life.' Katherine E. Hunt, Early Theatre

Music and Society in Early Modern England is the first comprehensive survey of English popular music during the early modern period to be published in over one hundred and fifty years. Christopher Marsh offers a fascinating and broad-ranging account of musicians, the power of music, broadside ballads, dancing, psalm-singing and bell-ringing. Drawing on sources ranging from ballads, plays, musical manuscripts and diaries to wills, inventories, speeches and court records, he investigates the part played by music in the negotiation of social relations, revealing its capacity both to unify and to divide. The book is lavishly illustrated and is accompanied by a website featuring forty-eight specially commissioned recordings by the critically acclaimed Dufay Collective. These include the first ever attempts to reconstruct the distinctively early-modern sounds of 'rough music' and unaccompanied congregational psalm-singing.

Introduction
1. The power of music
2. Occupational musicians: denigration and defence
3. Occupational musicians: employment prospects
4. Recreational musicians
5. Ballads and their audience
6. Balladry and the meanings of melody
7. 'The skipping art': dance and society
8. Parish church music: the rise of the 'singing psalms'
9. Parish church music: bells and their ringers
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]