Music in European cities and towns to c. 1650: a bibliographical survey

Abstract

As all urban historians will know, the 1996 Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History is one of the main resources for those researching the history of cities and towns in Europe and the rest of the world. Analysis of its c. 20,000 entries is revealing. Just over 50 per cent concern urban population, physical, social and economic structure and a further 12 per cent are devoted to transport and communications and politics and administration. Only around 6 per cent of the citations refer to urban ‘culture’ in any form and virtually none concern music in towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe or indeed that of any time or place. In the light of this, it is clear that urban history still tends to be restricted largely to the ‘essentially infrastructural’ and is still considered to be mostly ‘a matter of demography, distributive economics and consequential social arrangements and re-adjustments’.