Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment by Rebecca Cypess (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919049

1534-150X

Elizabeth Weinfield,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Reviewed by: Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment by Rebecca Cypess Elizabeth Weinfield Women and Musica l Salons in t he Enlightenment. By Rebecca Cypess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. [xxii, 365 p. ISBN 9780226817910 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780226817927 (ebook), $54.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Audio examples at http://press.uchicago.edu/sites/cypess. This broadly conceived and exceptionally detailed work is a collection of interdependent essays that consider the musical salon during the Enlightenment period, specifically 1760–1800, as a space for music making and as praxis for understanding music making in the West. Salons have piqued the interest of musicologists in recent years for the insights they provide into domestic music practices, transcription, and coauthor-ship. Rebecca Cypess's seven chapters work as case studies that complicate the notion that the salon was only a social space, in which music was contingent upon other domestic activities. Her essays unpack the salon's role in the formation of the Enlightenment sense of selfhood, assess the intersections of gender and social status at play in these complex spaces, and track the salon's transference to the colonial US at a time of profound cultural formation. The women profiled presided over social gatherings in their own homes. In many cases, they also performed; most of them composed. As a performer herself, Cypess (a fine historical keyboard-ist) displays special insight into their histories and includes with her volume recorded examples that illustrate how each of the salonnières navigated the complexities of the salon space in her own way. Salons during the Enlightenment contributed to a "cultivation of sympathy" (p. 64). Sympathy in the eighteenth century is akin to what we might call empathy today, and Cypess [End Page 525] implies that it also connotes a transference of ideas, not only between people but between the spheres they inhabit. The salon is thus a fertile space of intermingling, in which women used performance, conversation, and sociability as tools for self-expression—and power. In chapter 3, Cypess profiles Anne-Louise Brillon, who did not publicly perform due to societal conventions. Cypess discusses her compositions (some of which she redates based on reexaminations of testimony by Charles Burney) as "ephemera" yet stresses that they are filled with evidence of her musical ideals—"her poetics of the ephemeral" (p. 107). Cypess convincingly argues that Brillon had an influence on more-public-facing composers like Luigi Boccherini. Evidence comes with Boccherini's dedication of his own opus 5 to Brillon, in which he writes, "you have inspired them, and you embellish them" (p. 134). Brillon's Romanescas feature ample pedal use, particularly that of the damping pedal on the English square piano she received from Johann Christian Bach. In Cypess's accompanying recording, we can hear the influence of Brillon's harp-like style on Boccherini's opus 5, though the question presents itself as to whether this was a prevalent style at the time or evidence of cultivated ephemerality for the purposes of social propriety—or both. Cypess argues that Brillon's approach to composition was "purposefully unstudied" (p. 106), reflecting the composer's acute awareness of her social rank, and indeed Brillon emphasized fragility of sound, effects of timbre, and the unnotated aspects of the instrument. While "the sense of intimate sociability and ephemerality [Brillon] cultivated is supported by the sound of the instrument" (p. 117), it is also possible that Brillon was anticipating Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's empfindsamer Stil, considering her proximity to Johann Christian Bach and her instinct to closely follow other contemporary currents of style, such as her choice of instruments, literature, and mode of dress. Cypess continues her discussion with Marianne Martinez (a.k.a. Marianna Martines), daughter of the Spanish envoy to the Esterházy court and contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her primary argument is that Martinez operated within the space of the salon to cultivate an image that would aid in her social ascent; in other words, Martinez used music "to curate her image carefully" (p. 158). Martinez was a studied and accomplished composer, a student of Nicola Porpora and (likely) Joseph Haydn, and protégé of Esterházy court...