Mapping the soundscape: church music in English towns, 1450–1550

Topography and its metaphors have long dominated the historiography of towns and they continue to do so in the modern renaissance of what might be called ‘urban musicology’. Maps, plans and townscapes – likewise ‘soundscapes’ – have proved valuable in representing the diversity and disposition of activity, alongside the interplay of time and space and of private and public spheres. Yet at the same time a number of implications present in these constructs have yet to be fully explored, with consequences in turn for the ways in which we theorise the structures and dynamics of musical cultures. In this article we propose a redrafting of the institutional and historiographic ‘map’ of church music in English towns during the century or so before the Reformation. This serves as a preliminary to two larger questions, to be more fully investigated elsewhere but inevitably also touched upon here.