When Bells Spoke: A Conversation with Musicologist Dr. Alex Fisher

The Blue Hour: Sackbuts, Soundscapes, Bells, and Reformation Germany My interview with Professor Alex Fisher is now available as a podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Professor Fisher about bells, early music, soundscapes, weather, ritual, and the religious worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Alex Fisher is Professor in the UBC School of Music, where he coordinates Early Music. He is both a distinguished musicologist and a performing musician. Trained as a trombonist, he later specialized in the Renaissance sackbut and has performed with leading early music ensembles. He is also a co-founder of Cappella Borealis. As a scholar, Professor Fisher studies the musical, religious, and cultural worlds of early modern Germany, with particular interests in soundscapes, ritual, and the relationship between music and religious identity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. His books include Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria. We focus especially on two of his more recent publications: his chapter “Bells” in Information: A Historical Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2021, and his article “Hearing the Trumpets of the Church Militant: Weather Bells and Supernatural Audition in Post-Reformation Germany,” published in the Sixteenth Century Journal in 2022. Together, they invite us to think about bells not simply as musical instruments, but as technologies of communication, symbols of civic and religious life, and, for many centuries, voices believed to reach both human and supernatural listeners.