Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South Candace Bailey.
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcac024
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoCandace Bailey has written an impressive book that achieves its stated aim to challenge assumptions about music-making by women in the nineteenth-century United States. Unbinding Gentility is, above all, an ethnographic foray into performance traditions and the acquisition of music skills in the American South between roughly 1830 and 1880. Despite the parsimonious attention hitherto devoted to women performers during the nineteenth century, Bailey convincingly demonstrates that they, white and black, were committed, proficient, and ambitious music-makers. Similarly, both because and in spite of ideals of feminine gentility, women were conversant with a wider variety of music than we may have hitherto assumed. In both its larger findings and details, this book is full of surprises. Unbinding Gentility is a model of creative archival archaeology. Undergirding the book (and inspiring its title) is Bailey’s mining of the binders of sheet music compiled for and by women music-makers. In addition to offering important insights into nineteenth-century repertories, the binders also include telling annotations by their owners and other revealing ephemera. Bailey augments her deep dive in the binders with thoughtful readings of private correspondence, contemporary newspapers, published travel accounts, and memoirs. Weaving together these disparate materials, she reconstructs surprising details about the barely discerned world of women’s music-making.
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