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Music in the Collective Experience in Sixteenth-Century Milan.

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Music in the Collective Experience in Sixteenth-Century Milan. By Christine Suzanne Getz. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. [xii, 313 p. ISBN 0-7546-5121-5. $99.95]. Illustrations, music examples, appendices, bibliography, index.

Christine Suzanne Getz, professor at the University of Iowa, has in recent years made notable contributions to the history of music in the Duchy of Milan during the sixteenth century (including articles in Musica disciplina, Studi musicali, Early Music History, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association). The present volume builds on these studies (repeating parts of their content on occasion) and provides a comprehensive view of music making in the region. Getz draws on much previously unknown archival material, as well as discussing significant quantities of music, most of it unavailable in modern editions.

Judging from the book's title, the reader-would expect to find a study in the radically democratizing vein of Reinhard Strohm's Music in Late Medieval Bruges (2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]), in which the historical agenda is wrested away from an elite culture that had dominated earlier musicology, to focus instead on the "soundscape" of the city in its exuberant patchwork. The titles, preambles, and conclusions of Getz's chapters point strongly in this direction. That the rest of the book largely does not do so is in itself no weakness: much of the information she provides is extremely valuable, and some of it fascinating....

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