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.
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The story of how women's musicianship flourished at social gatherings in Europe and the Americas, as well as North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
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 (17671854) 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, 18451891 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.
Jacqueline Avila is an Associate Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research examines film music and the intersections of identity, tradition, and modernity in the Hollywood and Mexican film industries. She is the author of Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity during Mexico's época de oro (2019). Rebecca Cypess is Mordecai D. Katz and Dr. Monique C. Katz Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yeshiva University. She is the author of Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions (2016), and co-editor of Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy (2022).
