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The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs: Music and Court Ceremony in Early Modern Europe.

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The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs: Music and Court Ceremony in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Juan Jose Carreras and Bernardo Garcia. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music.) Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2005. [viii, 402 p. ISBN 1-84383-139-2. $190.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Spanish music, particularly that of the siglo d'oro, is finally beginning to receive serious attention by an international community of scholars and performers. For non-Spanish musicologists, the tenth Baroque Biennial Conference at the Universidad de Ia Rioja in summer 2002 was a critical opportunity for the exchange of ideas and symbolized the deepening integration of scholarship on Iberian music with broader musicological concerns. The present volume, originally published as La capilla real de los Austrias (Madrid: Fundacion Carlos de Amberes, 2001) and now translated into English by Yolanda Acker and edited by Tess Knighton, is another crucial step in this direction, making a body of significant essays accessible to a broader audience. For readers more accustomed to scholarship on the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs the title may be misleading at first glance, but the crucial distinction of "royal chapel" versus "imperial chapel" makes plain the Spanish focus. Collected and edited by Juan Jose Carreras and Bernardo Garcia, these essays now comprise the third installment of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, and form a welcome companion to another collection of essays in the same series, Church Music of Fifteenth-Century Spain, edited by Kenneth Kreitner (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2004).

The present volume's methodological focus on the "chapel" as a comprehensive institution of worship and ceremony ensures its relevance well beyond...

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