Music Books in Early Modern Europe: Materiality, Performance, and Social Expression

FAIN: FS-50192-08

Newberry Library (Chicago, IL 60610-3305)
Carla Zecher (Project Director: March 2008 to June 2010)

A four-week seminar for fifteen college and university faculty to examine music books produced in Europe between 1500 and 1700 and their connections with broader cultural and historical patterns.

The Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies proposes to offer a summer seminar for college and university teachers that will explore music books produced in Europe between 1500 and 1700. The seminar will engage with the history of books and readers, and with the social and cultural history of performance. Recent scholarship on the history of the book emphasizes the book object as a space for cultural performance at all levels, from the "how-to" manual to a source for philosophical speculation. Like many book objects, music books are by their nature performative, not only as records of performances (real or imagined), but also as guides or prescriptions for behavior, and as indicators of wider cultural patterns and concerns. Although this seminar will be of special interest to teachers of music history, we seek to attract a diverse group of participants from such academic fields as literature, history, art history, theater, and religious studies.