This volume demonstrates a new approach to cultural history, as it now being practiced by both historians and musicologists, and the field's quest to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, communication and meaning through the study of music and of musical practices. The contributors employ a resonant new methodological synthesis which combines the theoretical perspectives drawn from the "new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s with recent social, sociological, and anthropological theories.