This dissertation recounts how now-familiar rules for making music, along with countless unsung violations, issued from the wealthiest cities of early modern Europe. The project thus further historicizes Western music theory’s “regulative traditions,” per the formative disciplinary programs of Carl Dahlhaus and Thomas Christensen, through sociology on the rise of metropolitan bourgeois culture from roughly 1500 to 1750. Within that pivotal conjuncture of capital accumulation and colonial extraction normalized under what social historians have called “the civilizing process,” my dissertation argues that counterpoint rules encoded “aesthetiquette,” a poetics of politeness at once aural, oral, manual, and moral. The argument unfolds over three chapters grouped in two parts. Part I, “Mannerist Figures,” offers an Introduction to the age-old rule against composing parallel fifths and octaves. By tracing its rehearsal from commonplaces to psychoacoustics, a conceptual history of musical “barbarism” indexes how forbidden parallels have long amplified ethnoreligious taboos and marvels. As a companion case study, Chapter 1 shows conversely that “Maxims of Brevity in the Lutheran Canon” favored a diminutive rhetorical style for aligning imitative pedagogy with theopolitical reforms. Examples are drawn from my translation of Heinrich Faber’s 1549 Little Compendium of Music for Beginners, the shortest yet longest-running German Protestant curriculum on the art of singing correctly, measured against wider Northern Renaissance disciplines of recantation. Part II, “Baroque Licenses,” opens with Chapter 2, an exposé of “How the English Madrigal Conquered Even the Animal World.” Among other lasting ecosocial effects, the early Stuart push for Anglosphere standardization redefined sonic mimicry of such beloved microfauna as the birds, the bees, and “Three Blind Mice”—if with equivocation on first principles of liberal humanism. As a closing counterpoint, Chapter 3 explores “Harmonic License in the Libertine Enlightenment.” Restored to Old Regime milieus and mythos, finally the late symphoniste du roi Jean-Philippe Rameau admits all manner of perversion and chaos engendered by irregular chord progressions. A Conclusion speculates on the fate of music theory to echo orders of hygiene and violence, from subcultures resounding with survivorship bias to those calling forth unheard miracles.