Erika T. Lin, George Mason University:
"In Staging Harmony Katherine Steele Brokaw convincingly demonstrates how music in early English drama participated in over a century of crucial religious change bybridging confessional divides and promoting ideological compromise. Drawing on an impressive breadth of knowledge about instrumental and vocal forms, theological debates, devotional practices, and staging conditions in a range of theaters, Brokaw reveals how sound as sensory experience enabled audience members to experience Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, and other seemingly intractable binaries as, instead, complementary. With detailed close readings and thorough scholarship, this interdisciplinary book is especially attentive to how music functions on both conscious and subconscious levels by creating complex webs of association."
Jonathan Baldo, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester:
"[Staging Harmony]... is an engaging and historically well-informed work that explores the complex relationship of music and drama over the long sixteenth century, filling in the gaps that result from focusing too narrowly on the Elizabethan commercial theater to the exclusion of early Tudor interludes, Reformist morality plays, schoolboy dramas, and court and household entertainments."
Christopher Marsh, Queen's University, Belfast:
"Staging Harmony is a marvelously rich and suggestive work that brings a fresh perspective to the complex interactions of music, religion, and drama across the Reformation divide. There is much here to excite literary scholars, historians, musicologists, and anybody with an interest in theater. An outstanding achievement."
Kent Cartwright, University of Maryland:
"Katherine Steele Brokaw's significant new book enlarges and enriches the burgeoning field of Tudor drama studies. The book reveals the interrelatedness of music, religion, and drama across a broad expanse of historical and cultural change in England. It moves with economy and with lucidity of argument and expression. Especially attractive is Brokaw’s sense that, for all the ways that musical developments in drama influence and are influenced by divisions and disruptions in religious and popular culture, they serve a deeper interest that deserves increased critical attention, the staging of the possibility of social harmony."
Gina Bloom, University of California, Davis:
"In this engaging and finely crafted book, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how plays written during a particularly tumultuous period of religious change in England used music to create social concord. With special attention to the soundscape of understudied early Tudor drama, Staging Harmony offers elegant theorization of the role of music in religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the field of sound studies and will interest readers from a range of fields, including drama criticism, performance studies, music history, and religious studies."
