Demonstrates how music is becoming unique mode of access into specific cites of cultural representation, exchange, contestation and the construction of experience New theoretical dimensions or inquiries characteristic of "the New Cultural History of Music" Features contributors at the forefront of both musicology and history This volume demonstrates the recent direction of cultural history, as it is now being practiced in both history and musicology, to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding and meaning-how they are constructed, negotiated and communicated on both an individual and a social level. Just as historians in their quest to understand the construction and transmission of meaning, musicologists are turning to new inquiries into cultural representations and their social dynamics, while remaining aware of music's distinctive "register" of representation as an abstract language and a performing art. As the case studies analyzed by musicologists and historians in this volume attest, both fields are not only posing similar questions but attempting to study music itself together with the relevant framing factors and contexts that imbued it with meaning. They are seeking to do so within a factually accurate yet theoretically sophisticated interpretation that combines the insights into language and semiotics characteristic of "the new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s and '90s with more recent sociological theories and their perspective on how symbols function within the larger field of social power. The volume illuminates how musicologists and historians are practicing the new cultural history of music, employing similar rubrics and specifically those emerging