This book deals with the production and consumption of music throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The text, which goes beyond a simple history of composers, styles or musical genres, explores issues related to patronage, education, civil and religious rituals, theater and visual culture of the time. The author focuses not only on the nature of music in the Baroque period, but also on the different ways in which men and women experienced music in their daily lives. In treating music as an expression of political and national identity, he examines it in the context of art and literature of the time, without forgetting political and religious conflicts, and issues of class and gender.