Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include ‘the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field’ and the difficulty we have with analysing the ‘aesthetic experience’ – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical ‘new historicism’ seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.

This discussion seeks to provide a context for the emergence of so-called ‘urban musicology’, both within nineteenth-century antiquarian endeavour and in response to scholarly trends in the 1970s and 1980s. The strengths, weaknesses and possible future directions of ‘urban musicology’ are also identified.

The city of Laon was a significant commercial and administrative centre in late medieval northern France. Laon's rich and powerful cathedral attracted many to its chapter, which was the largest in the country. In the years circa 1400 its ranks included a number of leading musicians. An investigation into their musical and non-musical duties sheds fascinating light on to the daily life of the cathedral musician and his position in the local urban and rural context.

Drawing on contemporary musings and references from a variety of civic records, this article will consider music heard in the public spaces of urban England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Negative reactions to performers such as common fiddlers and street traders became increasingly common as the period progressed and were intimately connected both with fears concerning the crowd-gathering potential of such people and with a desire to control the sound environment to enable effective sleep, worship and concentration.

Although urban historians have recently begun to study the city and the senses, relatively few have investigated the aural environment experienced by the ear. To a certain extent, towns are thus characterized as silent societies and sounds of whatever kind are not viewed as an integral part of urban life. This article, based on a small Spanish town called Jaca, aims to describe some of its most notable sounds during the ancien régime and to explore how inhabitants perceived them. Such an approach provides a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the totality of the urban experience of townspeople of the period, and also suggests some new lines of enquiry for future musicological research.

This essay looks at London in the second half of the nineteenth century, when features of musical life associated with a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie became firmly established. Prominent among such features, which are all closely related to the rapid increase in urban populations, were the commercialization and professionalization of music, new markets for cultural goods, a growing rift between art and entertainment, and the bourgeoisie's struggle for cultural domination.

As all urban historians will know, the 1996 Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History is one of the main resources for those researching the history of cities and towns in Europe and the rest of the world. Analysis of its c. 20,000 entries is revealing. Just over 50 per cent concern urban population, physical, social and economic structure and a further 12 per cent are devoted to transport and communications and politics and administration. Only around 6 per cent of the citations refer to urban ‘culture’ in any form and virtually none concern music in towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe or indeed that of any time or place. In the light of this, it is clear that urban history still tends to be restricted largely to the ‘essentially infrastructural’ and is still considered to be mostly ‘a matter of demography, distributive economics and consequential social arrangements and re-adjustments’.

In the towns of late medieval England (where perhaps 10 per cent of the population may have lived) the parish churches were being continuously expanded, adapted and decorated. Chantry and fraternity chapels were added between the nave pillars, or at the eastern ends of the aisles and here, as well as at the high altar, masses were celebrated and prayers recited with incessant devotion by the living for the repose of the souls of those who had died. These intercessory services, together with those of the usual liturgical round which took place in the choir and in the nave, were increasingly accompanied by complex polyphonic music involving several singers, both men and boys, and the playing of organs which were becoming ubiquitous in medieval parish churches. The development of this dynamic parish music has been detected, but not much studied. In part this is the result of the failure of urban historians and musicologists to talk to each other. Historians of late medieval religion have recently been exploring the diversity and sophistication of parochial devotional practices and have reaffirmed the importance of religious guilds and chantry foundations in enriching the liturgical practices of the parish, but they have paid little attention to music, and none to the impact of church music on civic ceremonial and the legitimating processes of urban rulers. Musicologists who have worked on the music of the English church have been, until very recently, comparatively uninterested in what happened beyond the interior of the church and, in any case, more interested in the great royal and collegiate foundations from which some music has survived. The surprising conclusion is that, for both urban historians and musicologists, the connected argument that links religious ritual, broadly defined, with the spatial and social dimensions of life and work in towns barely yet exists.

Interdisciplinarity has proved to be one of the enduring tenets of British urban history. As Fiona Kisby points out in her contribution to this special issue of Urban History, its centrality is enunciated in the agenda set by Jim Dyos in the 1960s, as the subject emerged as a self-conscious subdiscipline of British history, and in the editorials that launched this publication as a Yearbook and subsequently as a journal. The appeal of an interdisciplinary approach is that it allows those involved to transcend the straitjacket of traditional research and explore a given issue or subject from a multiplicity of angles. However, prioritizing such a methodology, though it might allow the intellectual high ground to be occupied temporarily, provides a real hostage to fortune, raising expectations that it often proves impossible to fulfil. Interdisciplinarity simply cuts against the dominant grain of academe. Where British urban historians have crossed the disciplinary barricades, they have tended to head in the direction of the social sciences (such as sociology, economics, geography and anthropology). A rapprochement with the arts (painting, film, literature, architecture, music, and the like) is less easy to discern. Yet with the growing interest in the last decade or so in cultural history the time is ripe to redress the balance. This music issue of Urban History, like that of August 1995 on ‘Art and the City’, can be seen as an attempt to do this. Its appearance coincides with the publication of a pioneering volume of essays, edited by Fiona Kisby, on Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, whose avowed aim is to ‘bring musicology within the sphere of urban history’. Though that collection is predominantly focused on western Europe (with six of the essays on the British Isles, six on the Continent, and one on South America) and on the years 1400 to 1650, it provides a model for how the agendas of musicologists and urban historians might be productively merged.