Consort Suites and Dance Music by Town Musicians in German-Speaking Europe, 1648–1700

This companion volume to The Courtly Consort Suite in German-Speaking Europe surveys the consort suites and dance music by musicians working in the seventeenth-century German towns. The central part of the book explores the organisation, content and assembly of town suites into carefully ordered printed collections, which refutes the concept of the so-called classical suite. The differences between court and town suites are dealt with alongside the often-ignored variation suite from the later decades of the seventeenth century and the separate suite-writing traditions of Leipzig and Hamburg.