Alex Fisher was appointed to the UBC faculty in 2002, and holds degrees from Northwestern University (BMus 1992), Indiana University (MA 1995), and Harvard University (PhD 2001). His interests include German music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ritual contexts for sacred music in the early modern era, sound studies, and aspects of music, soundscape, and religious identity in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

His work, which ranges from sixteenth-century studies to the present day, has been published in the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Early Music History, and elsewhere, and he has presented research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, American Historical Association, Renaissance Society of America, and other organizations. His books include Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580-1630, which appeared from Ashgate Press in 2004, and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria, 1550-1650, which appeared from Oxford University Press in 2014. A specialist in early wind instruments, he has performed in various early music ensembles and coordinates the UBC Early Music Ensemble.

Principal research interests include the relationship of music and sound to religious culture and confession in central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the religiously contested borderlands of southern Germany, where musical culture both reflected and was inflected by the consolidation of Protestant churches and the response of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. A further interest is the study of historical soundscapes, embracing music as well as the acoustic environment of artificial and natural sounds.

For a complete list of publications, visit Dr. Fisher’s website.