Matthew Laube, PhD

Education

PhD Royal Holloway, University of London

Academic Interests and Research

Music and the Reformation; social history of early modern music; church music and confessional coexistence; music and imprisonment; singing and catechesis; early modern street song and street singers; music in underground religious communities; brass instruments and instrumental music.

Biography

Matthew Laube joined the Baylor School of Music in 2022. Before this, Dr. Laube was a doctoral and postdoctoral research assistant at The British Library in 2011 and 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, he was a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow jointly at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Cambridge, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Robinson College, Cambridge. Most recently Dr. Laube was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Birkbeck, University of London. Since October 2018, he has been Assistant Editor and Reviews Editor of Early Music History. Dr. Laube completed an MM in Trombone Performance at the University of Utah, and an MM and PhD in Musicology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Dr. Laube is a historian of church music with a special interest in music in the Protestant Reformation. His first book, Acoustic Reformation: Music, Community, and Confession in Heidelberg, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Dr. Laube’s recent work has investigated music in the Dutch Reformation and the Eighty Years’ War. He is interested in the history of religious toleration and coexistence, and in deeper, pre-modern histories of music in hospitals, prisons, and underground churches.

Selected Publications

Books

Acoustic Reformation: Music, Community, and Confession in Heidelberg (University of Pennsylvania Press, under contract).

Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City, coedited with Marie-Alexis Colin and Iain Fenlon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022)

Articles

“Singing the News in Sixteenth-Century Cologne: The Music Broadsheets and Pamphlets of Nikolaus Schreiber,” Bohemica Litteraria, 26 (2023), 190-206.

"'The Harmony of One Choir’? Music and Social Identity in Reformation Heidelberg." Past & Present, 248/1 (2020), 41–86.

“Materializing Music in the Lutheran Home,” Past & Present, 243 suppl. 12 (2017), 114–38.

Book Chapters

“The Acoustics of Peace: Singing and Religious Coexistence in Seventeenth-Century Mechelen,” in Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches, ed. Benjamin Kaplan and Jaap Geraerts (London: Routledge, 2023), 49-66.

“Devotion,” in The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, ed. Vincenzo Borghetti and Tim Shephard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023).

“Introduction” (co-authored with Iain Fenlon and Marie-Alexis Colin) and “The Musical Cultures of Dissent and Anti-Catholicism in Counter-Reformation Douai,” in Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City, ed. Marie-Alexis Colin, Iain Fenlon and Matthew Laube (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022).

“Confessional Networks, Cultural Exchange and the Printed Music of Jerome Commelin (c.1550–1597),” in International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World, ed. Matthew McLean and Sara Barker (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 259–281.

Blog Posts

“A Black Life in Reformation Heidelberg: Dietrich Mohr, Kettledrummer and Trumpeter,” Past & Present Blog, 22 October 2020.