Cacophony, or vile scrapers on vile instruments: bad music in early modern English towns

Abstract

Drawing on contemporary musings and references from a variety of civic records, this article will consider music heard in the public spaces of urban England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Negative reactions to performers such as common fiddlers and street traders became increasingly common as the period progressed and were intimately connected both with fears concerning the crowd-gathering potential of such people and with a desire to control the sound environment to enable effective sleep, worship and concentration.