Full Description
For centuries, women have organized and hosted social gatherings known as 'salons,' which have served as sites of women's creativity and agency in the arts, sciences, and letters - especially music. This volume offers new understandings of women's musical salons across four centuries from North America, Latin America, Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, foregrounding an often-overlooked platform of women's musicianship in cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on disciplines including musicology, ethnomusicology, women's and gender studies, cultural and performance studies, film studies, art history, anthropology, and Jewish studies, the authors present a new history of women and music through the lens of musical salon culture. The twenty-five case studies included in the book present an array of practices and manifestations of the institution of musical salons. These cases demonstrate how women from a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds used salons as sites of agency, shaping their musical environments according to their distinctive interests and ideals.
Contents
Introduction Jacqueline Avila and Rebecca Cypess; 1. Le belle cantatrice: academies, conversazioni, and veglie in early modern Venice and Rome Wendy Heller; 2. Literary salons and musical conversations in seventeenth-century France John Romey; 3. Esperanza Malchi: Jewish women and musical diplomacy in the early modern Constantinople harem Elizabeth Weinfield; 4. Marie-Emanuelle Bayon and the salon as an eighteenth-century social strategy Rebecca Cypess; 5. Caroline Pichler and nineteenth-century (musical) salon culture in Vienna and Prague Anja Bunzel; 6. British women, abolitionism, and the musical salon in the late eighteenth century Julia Hamilton-Louey; 7. Musical salons and performance practices in Vienna, c. 1800 Nancy November; 8. The piano virtuosa at home and away: transnational salon networks of Maria Szymanowski, Maria Kalergis-Muchanoff, and Marcelina Czartoryska Halina Goldberg; 9. The aesthetics of the musical salon and Jewish reform at the home of Amalie Beer (1767-1854) Samuel Teeple; 10. Adeline Myers and the Myers family of Norfolk, Virginia: reimagining Jewish identity and mercantile culture in the early republic Virginia Whealton; 11. 'This declining art needs a strong hand to raise it': Fanny Hensel's house concerts Angela R. Mace; 12. Musical salons in nineteenth-century Mexico: women, cosmopolitanism, and identity Yael Bitrán Goren;13. Producing a world of meaning: music, gender, and collective identity in nineteenth-century Colombia salons Juan Fernando Velásquez; 14. Social inclusion and exclusion in nineteenth-century Dutch music 'salons' Floris MeansI; 15. 'Abre niña el piano': women, social mobility, and music in salons in mid-nineteenth-century Madrid Christine E. Wisch; 16. Rosalie Pacquot Boyer: pedagogue and salonnière in antebellum new Orleans Candace Bailey; 17. The music of Anne c. l. Botta's conversazione, 1845-1891 Sarah Tomasewski; 18. Managing domestic social gatherings: the hostess and musical performance at 'at homes' James Deaville; 19. Théâtre Orfila: staging salon opera in Parisian residential space Nicole Vilkner; 20. 'A firmly united nucleus of bright and eager music lovers': the amateur musical club of Chicago and the 1893 world's fair Emily C. Hoyler O'Hare; 21. The Estella bonds salon: a black Chicago renaissance genealogy of American art song Elizabeth Durrant and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden; 22. Sephardi women's voices in Judeo-Spanish as portable salon Vanessa Paloma Elbaz; 23. Salon México: salon performances and the precarious position of women performers in cine Mexicano Jacqueline Avila; 24. Black women, jazz cliques, and the making of the jazz salon Tammy L. Kernodle; 25. The hybrid spaces of sociability in the musical salon of Andrea Clearfield Rebecca Cypess; Bibliography.
