Alexander J. Fisher is Associate Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A musicologist specializing in music, sound, and religious culture in early modern Europe, he teaches courses in early music and coordinates the university's Early Music Ensemble.

• Acknowledgments


• Abbreviations for Source Locations


• I. Sound, Space, and Confession in Counter-Reformation Bavaria


• II. Sound and the Spaces of Worship


• III. Sound and Spaces of Devotion


• IV. Sound and Confession in the Civic Sphere


• V. Music, Sound, and Processional Culture


• VI. Sound, Pilgrimage, and the Spiritual Geography of Counter-Reformation Bavaria


• Bibliography


• Index

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores 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.