Stephen Rose, Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. XVI + 243 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-42107-2.

enduring fascination with specialised and particular local histories. Put bluntly: why might anyone read a whole book about a community of long-deceased canons in a small European town? I’m not sure Kirkman has the most persuasive answers to offer here. For me the book gives a little too much weight in this regard to rhetorical gestures: seeing through windows to distant pasts (p. 3) or hearing distant echoes (p. 276), finding ‘patterns of interaction that are essentially timeless and : : : timelessly absorbing’ (p. 4), or, perhaps most difficult of all, his evocation of walking into the collegiate church as ‘com[ing] home’ (p. 21). Our desire for the past is something that is always time-full, located in our particular histories, and we do need to reflect in depth, moving beyond the antiquarian, if we are to understand the problems surrounding those desires (for home – but what is home?) and the possibilities for future action and engagement in the world that our scholarship promotes.