Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bunzel, Anja
• Wollenberg, Susan

Titel

Rethinking Salon Music: Case-Studies in Analysis

Ist Teil von

• Nineteenth-century music review, 2023-08, Vol.20 (2), p.359-364

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In reality the boundaries between the two were as blurred as those between the private and the public, and between amateur and professional.5 In the light of the latter, it is important to note that the publishing business, review practice and marketing strategies surrounding salon culture challenge the concept of the salon as an entirely unbiased space of unlimited possibilities.6 While salons per se were not commercially orientated, commercial interests may have been implicated in the networking that took place: these gatherings enabled attendees to meet potential new students, and buyers, publishers or reviewers of their music. In the collection of essays that form this issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the term ‘salon’ is read in its broadest possible sense: salons are social gatherings in private homes. [...]of importance is the evidence provided by those attendees who regularly and meticulously documented social activities from the perspective of a visitor. In this regard, the network of references and coded messages in the repertoire under discussion forms a core element in the understanding and interpretation of salon music. Besides the evidence of contemporary surprise, scepticism, and curiosity evoked by the challenging of social conventions in performing certain musical styles (as observed by Václav Jan Tomášek during Steibelt's visit to Prague, and decoded here by Girling), this is seen in Sobaskie's portrayal of female patronage apropos contrasting examples of Fauré's compositions for the salon; and in Suurpää's interpretation of Schumann through the lens of the prevailing Romanticist aesthetic of the time,