GRMUS 662H — The Musical Salon

2 credits
Fall
Elizabeth Weinfield

This seminar will chart the musical salon as both a space for music making and as a praxis for understanding music making in the West, from the early modern period to the present day. We will consider the salon as a social space, in which music was contingent upon other domestic activities; challenge the historiographical origin of the musical salon in 18th-century France by approaching earlier events of “musicking” in Spain and the Low Countries; navigate the salon’s role in the formation of the Enlightenment sense of selfhood; study the salon’s transference to colonial America; reassess the salon at its heyday in 19th-century Germany; and investigate current iterations of salon culture, such as Groupmuse. Using recent scholarship by Rebecca Cypess, Elisabeth Le Guin, Elizabeth Weinfield, Susan Stabile, and others, we will assess the intersections of gender, religion, and social status at play in these complex spaces while deepening our understanding of the music performed within them.