A seminar for upper division music majors. Topics will change each semester but will always represent a fairly narrow focus on a single issue in the history, interpretation, or social meaning of music. The course provides students with an opportunity to go deeply into one subject, to discuss their ideas in a seminar setting, and to carry out a substantial independent research project.

Feminist historians and critics have long debated the validity of separating ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, with the former traditionally denoting domesticity, family life, home, intimacy and interiority, and the latter associated with the world of professional work, political participation and civic engagement. In this seminar course we will probe the gendered meanings and parameters of ‘domesticity’ and the ‘private sphere’ in connection with music and music-making in the long nineteenth century. During this period, the salon and the parlor functioned as multifaceted and liminal sites of musical performance and consumption. By attending to the cultivation of music within these interior spaces, we will explore the gendered history of classical music in Europe and the USA, as well as the intersection of this history with issues of social class, canon formation, cultural heritage, nation-building and empire. Our focus will primarily fall on nineteenth-century piano music and song, including the values and meanings attached to so-called salon music, parlor music or easy music, as well as to transcription and arrangement of large-scale works intended either for the virtuoso performer or for the amateur sheet music market. But we will also look back to eighteenth-century practices of domestic music-making, and forwards to twentieth-century developments in sound technology and women’s work. An introduction to the problem of ‘separate spheres’ within the wider humanities will provide our point of departure for exploring varieties of music-making in the home, as well as the cultural work of music and musicians in sustaining (or subverting) idealizations of femininity, gentility and self-cultivation. In addition to contextualizing established Romantic repertoire by male and female composers, we will consider the range of women’s musical activities as composers, patrons, performers, pedagogues, consumers and collectors. Specific topics will include female authorship and celebrity; musical pedagogy and the boundaries between amateurism and professionalism; the culture of sensibility and sentimentalism; intersections between female gentility and race; and the role of performance practice and technology in configuring and reconfiguring music’s relationship to public and private space.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills