Musicians’ Mobilities and Music Migrations in Early Modern Europe

At a time when the future mobility of Europe-based professional musicians—including those working in the classical music industry—is increasingly uncertain (or, at the very least, potentially threatened by untenable bureaucratic hurdles) in the wake of the Brexit decision, it seems worth dwelling on the opening thoughts of this edited collection’s preface. There, the volume’s editors, Gesa zur Nieden and Berthold Over, note that the ‘musical migrations’ of the early modern era not only made a significant contribution to the ‘dynamics and synergy of the European cultural scene’, but also played an important role in developing ‘cohesion within a common European cultural identity’ (p. 9). The book’s focus arises from a recent European Union-funded research project, ‘Music Migrations in the Early Modern Age: The Meeting of the European East, West, and South’ (also known as MusMig), which ran from September 2013 until August 2016, uniting researchers from Croatia, Germany, Poland, and Slovenia under the direction of the Zagreb-based musicologist Vjera Katalinić. The selection of twenty essays contained in the volume was drawn from a workshop held under the project’s auspices in Mainz in 2014—an event that expanded beyond members of MusMig to include scholars from elsewhere in Europe as well.

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