URBANMUSICS: Urban Musics and Musical Practices in Sixteenth-Century Barcelona Project funded by: Marie Curie Sklodowska Foundation Integration Grant (CIG-2012, no.321876)
Duration: 4 years (1 December 2012-30 November 2016)
Budget: 100,000€
Participants: 2
PI: Tess Knighton
Research assistant: Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita

The URBANMUSICS project aimed to look at urban musics and musical practices in sixteenth-century Europe through the optic of the Mediterranean city of Barcelona, its external European musical networks and internal music dynamic, as well as the more general question of urban musical experience in the early modern period. Urban music history, hitherto generally focused on institutional history, has rarely attempted to look in a holistic way at the whole range of different musics practiced in a city, and, Spanish music history in particular has tended to concentrate almost exclusively on major ecclesiastical institutions. The aim of the URBANMUSICS project was, therefore, to go beyond the institutional to draw nearer to the daily musical experience of those living in the urban environment by adopting broader cross-disciplinary historical approaches, such as cultural history, history of the book, micro-history and historical anthropology, to understand the social functions of music and urban society’s engagement with it through cultural and social expectations as well as levels of musical literacy and established conduits of oral transmission. The musical life of the city is considered through the role of music in urban ritual an d ceremonial and through the everyday musical experience of inhabitants, based primarily on the analysis of contemporaneous writings, such as relaciones, notarial and other documentation rarely used by music historians. Almost every inhabitant came into contact with a notary and research for the project affords remarkable insight into the musical experience and expectations of social groups, including women, musical amateurs and those at the fringes of society, such as heretics, prisoners, blind beggars and prostitutes. A further group of considerable importance for the daily musical life of the city includes those who combined a profession such as c candle-maker, barber, auctioneer or farmer with music-making on a semi-professional level as employees of city institutions. Close analysis of notarial documentation reveals shared eschatological beliefs in which music was seen as a conduit between earth and heaven, ownership and use of musical objects such as music books and instruments, and contracts between printers and booksellers, instrumental-makers and their clientele, teachers and apprentices or private pupils. Similarly, new findings emerged as regards the contribution of women to urban musical life, as patrons and performers and their overall musical experience, including the high degree of porosity between female convents and urban society; their cultural impact, especially on their immediate hinterland in the city, was considerable. The relationship of women of varying social status – noblewomen, women in devotional and domestic contexts, and prostitutes – to the musical life of the city was explored through close and contextualised reading of contemporaneous relaciones, travel writing, biography, and necrology, correspondence and poetry as well as Inquisitorial and notarial documentation, where women’s voices can be heard more directly than through traditional institution-based studies. Another specific area where new methodologies were developed during the project, related to questions of orality and aurality in the urban musical context, with exploration of the dynamic between printed, written and unwritten musics and levels of musical literacy in the early modern city. Approaches and analytical techniques from history of the book are adopted and adapted to shed light on the production, selling, ownership and use of music books, whether in print or manuscript. Certain kinds of print – such as catechisms or manuals (artes) of plainchant and polyphony – were cheaply produced and reached levels of mass production, thus impacting on levels of musical literacy, while pamphlets and broadsheets of ballads and devotional songs circulated equally widely and tapped into an unwritten repertory of song and hymn melodies known to many inhabitants. Similarly, the construction of musical instruments and their presence in the churches, homes and lives of the inhabitants of Barcelona has resulted in a much more nuanced understanding of the extent to which musical activity permeated everyday urban experience. Daily devotional practice as part of social identity and hierarchy has been studied through wills and the foundation of chapels and anniversaries in parish and convent churches in order to grasp the significance of this kind of musical experience for the listener and to gauge the density of musical practice.
    Throughout the URBANMUSICS project intensive research was carried in almost twenty archives and libraries, primarily in Barcelona. This research resulted in a vast collection of almost entirely new material that is in the process of being entered into the URBANMUSICS database which is progressively being placed on open access, together with material that has accrued since the project finished in 2016. (See the link to the database on the main page.) As a result, analysis of the musical experience of a city such as Barcelona through this data becomes not only a case study in cultural micro-history, but also affords a model for the development of a typology of research materials and methodologies that can be applied (and adapted as necessary) to the cultural and musical life of other urban centres. The study of daily musical experience opens up new research directions in historical sound studies, urban soundscape, performance spaces, acoustemology and history of the senses and emotions, as well as questions of gender and social identity and integration. These aspects have already begun to be studied in the subsequent projects CONFRASOUND, WOMUNET and SOUNDSPACE.

Main lines of research

   • Daily musical life in early modern Barcelona
   • Music and eschatological belief in early modern Spain
   • Music-making in domestic spaces in early modern Barcelona
   • Early modern soundscapes in Barcelona and European cities 
   • The contribution of the Inquisition to early modern ritual in Barcelona
   • Female convents as centres of music-making in early modern Barcelona

Research team

Principal investigator: Tess Knighton (ICREA / UAB) 
Research assistant: Ascension Mazuela-Anguita (Universidad de Granada)

Publications