Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria [Paperback]

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavariaexplores 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 sound shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound 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.Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavariaexplores 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 CatholCc