URBANMUSICS · Urban musics and musical practices in sixteenth-century Europe

The urban musics and musical practices of sixteenth-century European cities have been studied only rather patchily in terms of geography and partially in terms of urban culture. Renaissance Italian cities, benefiting from a strong cultural historical tradition, have fared relatively well, while music in the urban context in France, Flanders, Germany and England has been considered in a steady trickle of studies over recent decades. The cities of the Iberian Peninsula, however, remain largely unexplored, a situation that derives in part from a peculiarly Spanish music historiographical trend that resulted in a series of studies focusing on cathedral musical life, with little or no consideration of a broader urban context. The preservation of the majority of Spanish sixteenth-century music sources in cathedral archives and the priest-musicologist tradition that persisted in Spain until the1980s were major factors in this trend, factors that also help to explain the still prevailing perception of Spanish musical culture as isolated from, and largely irrelevant to, the European musical mainstream. There is thus a compelling need to review this situation through the identification and analysis of the different musics (written and unwritten), musical practices (official and unofficial) and performative spaces of a city such as Barcelona. As a major Mediterranean port open to France and Italy and a hub for the book trade, Barcelona was clearly not isolated from the rest of Europe, and its urban culture can be analyzed in depth thanks to the wealth of documentary and musical material in the city’s archives. By developing methodologies drawn from cultural history, historical anthropology and ethnomusicology, by which music is considered in the context of urban culture and social interaction and communication from a totality of perspectives, this innovatory and interdisciplinary project will take a step further the mapping of European cultural history.