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.

Author Biography

Jacqueline Avila is an Associate Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research examines film music and the intersections of identity, tradition, and modernity in the Hollywood and Mexican film industries. She is the author of Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity during Mexico’s época de oro (2019). Rebecca Cypess is Mordecai D. Katz and Dr. Monique C. Katz Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yeshiva University. She is the author of Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions (2016), and co-editor of Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy (2022).