Book excerpt: Although the musical achievements of the Franco-Flemish school have attracted many writers, this book is the first to show how the artists and composers of Bruges worked side by side to shape their acoustic and visual environment and to express their fellow citizens' spiritual needs in art. By combining the methods of modern musicology and those of local historiography, Strohm vividly recreates the music of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders in its socio-economic context, from the pageants and minstrelsy of the court to popular entertainments and the earliest public concerts.