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This book offers a new narrative of Baroque music, one which defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. It reconstructs how men and women from different status groups experienced music, and their goals as patrons, performers, audiences, and authorities. Music was an essential part of any urban festivity, as well as of everyday life. Towns, along with courts, were the most important sites of music-making in the Baroque era (roughly 1580 to 1750). While courts are relatively well understood, the social history of music in towns is not. The lack of insight is especially striking since figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann were educated and spent most of their working lives in towns. Building on the approaches of historians, musicologists, and sociologists, this project demonstrates to historians how central music was to urban culture, and shows musicologists how embedded musical life was in society.