Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WOMENSONG (Women Songwriters of the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Exploring the Sentimental Voice)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-09-30
Context and overall objectives
The second half of the nineteenth century in Britain witnessed a sharp rise in professional opportunities for women in music, particularly in the field of composition. While several notable women attained public success producing large-scale works for major concert venues, most aspiring female composers of this era conformed to long-standing gender conventions by publishing simple songs and keyboard music suitable for informal performance in the drawing room or parlour. Owing to associations with amateurism on the one hand, and with a commercialised sheet music industry on the other, such repertoire has been historically overshadowed by the parallel movements of Romanticism and modernism in the arts. This project focuses in detail on the work of female song composers, lyricists, collectors and arrangers active in Britain during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. By situating these figure and their music within local and global networks of print circulation, performance and cultural exchange, it re-evaluates ephemeral or "minor" repertoire and its social and political meanings within larger narratives of urban mobility, empire and media history.
The project has three overall objectives. 1) To establish an interdisciplinary framework through which to approach women’s involvement with song and song culture in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain by critically exploring concepts of domesticity, amateurism, sentimentality, the popular and the middlebrow. 2) To undertake close contextual readings of individuals and songs in ways that address connections with the urban environment, imperialism and wider popular culture (including with categories and genres such as folk music and blackface minstrelsy). 3) To examine the geographical mobility and historical legacy of women’s songs as mediated by technologies of print, sound media and cinema, paying particular attention to transatlantic crossings and exchanges.
At a time when the vast majority of pieces performed by orchestras worldwide are still composed by white men, this project participates in initiatives to diversify classical music canons, concert programming and curricula, and to advance our understanding of women as agents of music history. At the same time, the research enriches knowledge of British culture and society by addressing the importance of music – and song in particular – to histories of female professionalisation and creativity, and to experiences of class, race and place.
The second half of the nineteenth century in Britain witnessed a sharp rise in professional opportunities for women in music, particularly in the field of composition. While several notable women attained public success producing large-scale works for major concert venues, most aspiring female composers of this era conformed to long-standing gender conventions by publishing simple songs and keyboard music suitable for informal performance in the drawing room or parlour. Owing to associations with amateurism on the one hand, and with a commercialised sheet music industry on the other, such repertoire has been historically overshadowed by the parallel movements of Romanticism and modernism in the arts. This project focuses in detail on the work of female song composers, lyricists, collectors and arrangers active in Britain during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. By situating these figure and their music within local and global networks of print circulation, performance and cultural exchange, it re-evaluates ephemeral or "minor" repertoire and its social and political meanings within larger narratives of urban mobility, empire and media history.
The project has three overall objectives. 1) To establish an interdisciplinary framework through which to approach women’s involvement with song and song culture in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain by critically exploring concepts of domesticity, amateurism, sentimentality, the popular and the middlebrow. 2) To undertake close contextual readings of individuals and songs in ways that address connections with the urban environment, imperialism and wider popular culture (including with categories and genres such as folk music and blackface minstrelsy). 3) To examine the geographical mobility and historical legacy of women’s songs as mediated by technologies of print, sound media and cinema, paying particular attention to transatlantic crossings and exchanges.
At a time when the vast majority of pieces performed by orchestras worldwide are still composed by white men, this project participates in initiatives to diversify classical music canons, concert programming and curricula, and to advance our understanding of women as agents of music history. At the same time, the research enriches knowledge of British culture and society by addressing the importance of music – and song in particular – to histories of female professionalisation and creativity, and to experiences of class, race and place.
The project entailed an outgoing phase in the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley. It began with in-depth interdisciplinary scholarship and research into nineteenth-century music and gender, Romanticism and female authorship, London concert life and popular culture, mobility studies, and Victorian periodical and print culture. An initial phase of primary research into historic sheet music and women songwriters was followed by a more sustained and in-depth period of archival work and close reading focused on materials held in libraries archives in the UK, Europe and the US. The research then homed in on two case studies. The first centred on the black British composer, singer and educator Amanda Ira Aldridge and entailed tracing her connections with African and African American musicians, artists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The second case study focused on music-literary relationships and the figure of the “Poetess” in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Initial findings were disseminated at international conferences and two articles are underway for future publication. The research fed into a major new undergraduate teaching module on ‘Nineteenth-Century Music and Domestic Space’, which was delivered at UC Berkeley in the Fall semester 2022, in addition to graduate seminars on modernism and sentimentality at King's College London.
The research has begun to revaluate the status of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women and their music in ways that go beyond binary assumptions about public/private space or amateur/professional identities. Through detailed archival work, close reading and contextualisation, the research is developing new ways of appreciating women’s music-making – and the genre of song in particular – as conditioned by interdisciplinary and transnational movements and communities. The project will result in published research papers on two case studies, in addition to shorter online articles for non-specialist audiences. The archival research undertaken thus far will lead to a more practical collaboration with performers to explore the repertoire and its context. As the project continues to progress, it will be of relevance to a larger interdisciplinary community of scholars across musicology/ethnomusicology, women’s history, black British history and nineteenth-century literature and culture. The project has engaged undergraduate and graduate students in music history and performance in the UK and the US. The research has the potential to impact practicing musicians, students and audience members beyond the research community by attending to growing public interest in marginalised repertoire by historic women composers.