Using archival documents, music prints, manuscripts and contemporary writing, Getz examines the musical culture of sixteenth-century Milan. The book investigates the musician's role as an actor and a functionary in the political, religious, and social spectacles produced by the Milanese church, state and aristocracy within the city's diverse urban spaces. Furthermore, it establishes a context for the numerous motets, madrigals, and lute intabulations composed and printed in sixteenth-century Milan by examining their function within the urban milieu in which they were first performed.