Four Centuries of Women's Musical Salons

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.