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 works 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, mobility and place.
