The title of Jorge Morales's first monograph suggests a comprehensive study of one of the most prolific, if occasionally overlooked, composers of the early seventeenth century. Sigismondo D'India et ses mondes appears at first glance to be a traditional life-and-works study, promising to bring to light a composer's place in the musical and cultural context of his day. Morales's goals are, however, a great deal more ambitious. It is surprising that few large-scale studies exist for Sigismondo D'India (ca. 1582–1629); despite the composer's substantial output and peripatetic presence within and between the Northern Italian courts, scholarly works on the composer's music have been relatively few. Sigismondo D'India et ses mondes is one of a small handful of book-length studies devoted entirely to the composer and his music, most recent among them Andrea Garavaglia's 2005 monograph Sigismondo D'India “drammaturgo.” But Morales aims to write a different kind of music history, one in which the very idea of historical context—what he calls the composer's “worlds”—includes a complex tapestry of crisscrossed networks that “allows us to think of music history as a history of cultural practices” (7).

The book promises not only to consider the life and music of Sigismondo D'India on their own terms, and not, as is more common, as a peripheral or complementary figure to his famous contemporary Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), but also to redefine the scope of a composer's involvement in diplomacy, politics, and artistic exchange. Morales sees D'India as exceptional not through his musical output alone, but because he occupied a somewhat different kind of social space than did many of his contemporaries. In this view, the composer's life should be understood within the tradition of the Renaissance musician-courtier, as a kind of historical agent whose activities are very much enmeshed in a web of small-scale transactions (micro-contexts) the significance of which may be profound but not immediately apparent. In tracing D'India's movements across courts and cities Morales seeks to understand how cultural transfer, in this case of musical books dedicated to patrons in a variety of sociopolitical spheres, does not merely result in the transmission or dissemination of musical styles and practices, but rather transforms them to create a reciprocal flow of influences. If Morales aims to expand the methodological framework of the discipline of musicology itself and move toward what he calls a global perspective on the history of music, his introductory remarks also express a word of caution, and a welcome one at that, about the practical feat of attempting to write across many disciplines. “Without theoretical boundaries,” he writes, “interdisciplinarity is transformed into an empty vessel where the infinite expansion of concepts ends by dissolving the very subject of the research” (13).

The book is therefore not squarely traditional in its musicological approach; in fact, despite its impressive length, it contains very little about the music itself. Instead, it traces the complex threads of influence arising from the way D'India positioned his musical collections. D'India was strategic—even multivalent—in that he dedicated his books of music to a wide variety of different kinds of patrons, using musical style to suit not only personal tastes but also to complement theoretical and philosophical musical understandings within different intellectual circles. The book is divided into two parts. The first, an expanded version of Morales's doctoral dissertation, is divided into eight chapters chronicling each of D'India's worlds—the cities and courts he worked in, either directly or indirectly. The chapters trace the course of D'India's life, beginning with his origins in Sicily, through his time at the Savoy court in Turin, his various interactions with artistic networks both within Italy (Parma, Piacenza, Milan, Venice, Rome) and outside (England, Austria, Germany), and ends in Modena, where the composer died, likely of malaria, in April of 1629. The core chapters are complemented with very detailed and expansive footnotes and the plentiful subheadings that divide the core text are appreciated, if sometimes unnecessary. The second part is a compendium of all the known writings and primary-source documents pertaining to D'India's career, including correspondences, prefaces, dedicatory epistles, and other archival documents. These shed valuable light on the facets of D'India's artistic endeavors, in particular the complexities of the courtly entertainments for which the composer provided various kinds of music. The transcriptions, which provide the original Italian with French translations, are very useful to have as references and as a complement to the purpose of the book. One wonders, however, if such extensive primary-source transcriptions might work equally well as an online supplement instead of in print.

In sum, Sigismondo D'India et ses mondes encourages a reconsideration of ways in which a composer was involved not only in artistic networks but also political and diplomatic ones. If Morales's study of archival documents updates and expands our understanding of D'India's biography, it also begs the question: “might biography,” traditionally understood, “be the best method for the historian of music?” (281).