The Augsburg Stadtpfeifer: Financial, Sonic, and Social Significance in the Early Modern German City

Civic music from German cities in the early modern Holy Roman Empire have remained comparatively underrepresented in musicological research until recent reexaminations of records and use of alternative methodologies.This dissertation seeks to dispel dismissive understandings of civic musicians to demonstrate their significance and dominance in the cultural life of cities as equal to those employed by the church or court. As performers and composers, they worked with everyday people and dignitaries alike, providing music for weddings, public concerts, parades, processionals, and other city festivities. Through the quality and quantity of their performances, civic musicians were also prominent contributors to the positive perception of their city as a cultural center. One measure of early modern German cities' importance was their ability to employ musicians as salaried civil servants and to use civic music as an acoustical representation of power. Using the Free City of Augsburg as a case study, this dissertation assesses financial, aural, and sociological sources to establish how and why German civic musicians were a valued and culturally influential asset. Doing so recasts civic musicians as significant figures in the music of early modern Europe by examining the contractual obligations and salaries of the seventeenth-century Augsburg Stadtpfeifer alongside their sonic and social impacts as valued symbols of their community.