Four centuries of women's musical salons : a cross-cultural history / edited by Jacqueline Avila, Rebecca Cypess.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Avila, Jacqueline A., editor.

Cypess, Rebecca, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--History and criticism.

Music.

Salons--History--Cross-cultural studies.

Salons.

Women composers--History--Cross-cultural studies.

Women composers.

Women music patrons--History--Cross-cultural studies.

Women music patrons.

Women musicians--History--Cross-cultural studies.

Women musicians.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History

Cross-cultural studies

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Summary:

"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"-- Cambridge Core.

Contents:

Le belle cantatrici : academies, conversazioni, and veglie in early modern Venice and Rome / Wendy Heller

Literary salons and musical conversations in seventeenth-century France / John Romey

Esperanza Malchi : Jewish women and musical diplomacy in the early modern Constantinople harem / Elizabeth Weinfield

Marie-Emanuelle Bayon and the salon as an eighteenth-century social strategy / Rebecca Cypess

Caroline Pichler and nineteenth-century (musical) salon culture in Vienna and Prague / Anja Bunzel

British women, abolitionism, and the musical salon in the late eighteenth century / Julia Hamilton-Louey

Musical salons and performance practices in Vienna, c. 1800 / Nancy November

The piano virtuosa at home and away : transnational salon networks of Maria Szymanowska, Maria Kalergis-Muchanoff, and Marcelina Czartoryska / Halina Goldberg

The aesthetics of the musical salon and Jewish reform at the home of Amalie Beer (1767-1854) / Samuel Teeple

Adeline Myers and the Myers family of Norfolk, Virginia : reimagining Jewish identity and mercantile culture in the early republic / Virginia E. Whealton

“This declining art needs a strong hand to raise it” : Fanny Hensel’s house concerts / Angela R. Mace

Musical salons in nineteenth-century Mexico : women, cosmopolitanism, and identity / Yael Bitrán Goren

Producing a world of meaning : music, gender, and collective identity in salons of nineteenth-century Colombia / Juan Fernando Velasquez

Social inclusion and exclusion in nineteenth-century Dutch music “salons” / Floris Meens

“Abre niña el piano” : women, social mobility, and music in salons in mid-nineteenth-century Madrid / Christine E. Wisch

Rosalie Pacquot Boyer : pedagogue and salonnière in antebellum New Orleans / Candace Bailey

The music of Anne C. L. Botta’s conversazione in New York City, 1845-91 / Sarah Tomasewski

Managing domestic social gatherings : the hostess and musical performance at at-homes / James Deaville

“Théâtre Orfila” : staging salon opera in Parisian residential space / Nicole Vilkner

“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

The Estella Bonds Salon : a Black Chicago Renaissance genealogy of American art song / Elizabeth Durrant and Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden

Sephardi women’s voices in Judeo-Spanish as a portable salon / Vanessa Paloma Elbaz

Salon México : salon performances and the precarious position of women performers in cine mexicano / Jacqueline Avila

Black women, jazz cliques, and the making of the jazz salon / Tammy L. Kernodle

The hybrid spaces of sociability in the musical salon of Andrea Clearfield / Rebecca Cypess.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (Cambridge Core, viewed February 20, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Four centuries of women's musical salons

ISBN:

9781009103633

1009103636

OCLC:

1572419066

Publisher Number:

CIPO000335721

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license