Soundscapes of Histories Entwined

For many, the coincidence of social practices uniting music and food immediately conjure up the Feast of the Pheasant in fifteenth-century Burgundy, or the lavish entertainments at the Este court recorded by Cristoforo di Messisbugo. The picture that emerges from such reconstructions of early modern princely banquets and the music which accompanied them, while presenting a complex and varied picture within the restricted confines of courtly decorum, effectively constitutes a micro-history born of exceptions. At the opposite end of the chain of the production, distribution, and consumption of foodstuffs, rather less attention has been paid to the worlds of work inhabited by those who inaugurated the process, as food travelled to the city from countryside, river, and sea. With the exception of a few much-discussed instances such as the repertories of London and Paris street cries, the same is largely true of the sonic environments of those who provided, distributed and sold food, and the same could be said of the sound worlds of English taverns and alehouses, where visiting hawkers offered oysters and pies, food which crossed social boundaries, for immediate consumption to the noisy accompaniment of ‘popular’ song. The essays in this collection span a wide chronological, geographical and social range stretching from seventeenth-century Rome to contemporary Ottoman food rituals and monastic practices in eighteenth-century Melk in an attempt to present a more nuanced picture of current scholarly enquiry into a rapidly emergent field.