{"title":"Ladies’ orchestras and music-as-performance in fin-de-siècle Britain","authors":"Shannon Draucker","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2161845","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces the emergence of a curious musical phenomenon in fin-de-siècle Britain: the ladies’ orchestra. As British music conservatories began to open to women in the 1870s and 1880s, and the violin gradually became a more “acceptable” instrument for women to play, ladies’ orchestras offered female musicians – still excluded from the country’s major symphony orchestras – opportunities to perform in public and sometimes even earn a living. Analyzing responses to ladies’ orchestras in the British periodical press, this article shows that ladies’ orchestras invited Victorian audiences to think about classical music in new ways. Ladies’ orchestras, though niche, fundamentally shifted the sensual experience of the orchestra concert, transforming it from a staid, solemn event centered on “the music itself” to a multisensorial spectacle, complete with colorful costumes, dazzling stage settings, and dynamic displays of musical vigor and passion. Ladies’ orchestras embraced what musicologists now call a “performance-based” approach, one that tunes into the spatial, temporal, sensory, kinesthetic, and affective dimensions of classical music.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"7 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2161845","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article traces the emergence of a curious musical phenomenon in fin-de-siècle Britain: the ladies’ orchestra. As British music conservatories began to open to women in the 1870s and 1880s, and the violin gradually became a more “acceptable” instrument for women to play, ladies’ orchestras offered female musicians – still excluded from the country’s major symphony orchestras – opportunities to perform in public and sometimes even earn a living. Analyzing responses to ladies’ orchestras in the British periodical press, this article shows that ladies’ orchestras invited Victorian audiences to think about classical music in new ways. Ladies’ orchestras, though niche, fundamentally shifted the sensual experience of the orchestra concert, transforming it from a staid, solemn event centered on “the music itself” to a multisensorial spectacle, complete with colorful costumes, dazzling stage settings, and dynamic displays of musical vigor and passion. Ladies’ orchestras embraced what musicologists now call a “performance-based” approach, one that tunes into the spatial, temporal, sensory, kinesthetic, and affective dimensions of classical music.
期刊介绍:
Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.