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Women’s Innovative Music-making In The 19th Century Home
Her research also involves
‘research by playing’ – not only finding the
arrangements and editing them to suit contemporary
musicians, but inviting musicians to perform them. Small-scale
‘take-home’ versions of Beethoven, Mozart and other
European public music of the nineteenth century reveal a lot
about the social lives of women – that, for instance,
at-home music-making was not just a way to have fun, but
also a chance for education, canon formation and
social-networking. Beethoven
called his era a ‘fruitful age of translations’, in
reference to the fashion for scaled-down versions of
large-scale compositions, which were performed in the
domestic realm, often by women.
These works are described
as ‘arrangements’ and the finding, playing, and
contextual analysis of them is the focus of research by
Associate Professor Nancy November, School of Music,
University of Auckland. She has been awarded $623,000 by Te
Pūtea Rangahau a Marsden, the Marsden Fund, to further her
investigations.
The era around 1800 in Vienna is commonly
considered as ‘Beethoven’s Vienna’ and associated with
high-classical culture. This might suggest that the music
most people performed and heard was faithful to the original
composition, which wasn’t always the case.
In the days
before the live concert had become commonplace, and before
the development of take-home music which can be heard on our
home stereo (or, these days, our mobile phone) arrangements
provided a way for people to re-hear, re-live and
re-understand public music, in private.
“It was a rare
and expensive to be able to go to a symphony performance,”
says Dr November. “If you wanted to make music and you
were a woman, you rarely made it to the stage - you almost
never played in an orchestra, or in a string
quartet.”
In some ways Vienna circa 1800 had much in
common with most cities around the world in 2020: “Large
assemblies, including symphony concerts, were often
forbidden before and after the Napoleonic wars. There was a
form of social isolation caused by surveillance under the
Metternich system.”
Where there is a creatively-minded
will, there is invariably a creative-minded way.
Musically-inclined women and men of the time created or
performed what Dr November describes as take-home versions
of a concerto or opera, which could be performed by small
groups in the home. “For women, this was practically the
only hands-on performance of public music they would ever
have,” says Dr November.
These arrangement filled a
number of un-filled gaps in women’s lives in 19th century
Vienna, she says: “They allowed women develop their
musicianship. It meant they could take leadership roles and
do their own arranging, and repurpose music for other
instruments. In these ways they gain some agency, in an
oftentimes male-dominated musical culture.”
Dr November
points to one music reviewer from 1829 who decried such
musical arrangements as ‘derangements’. That reviewer
also saw them as a potentially productive, transformative
part of musical culture:
“And what women were doing in
music then intrigues me, because we it’s a world of
private music-making that isn’t documented. As we know,
most histories of music have been written by men, and with a
strong emphasis on the public sphere. To find out about the
music of women of that era, in the domestic sphere, requires
a lot more digging, and more lateral
thinking.”
She
has recently worked with a quintet of five string players to
perform an arrangement of Beethoven’s Eroica.
“This is music that hasn’t been played for 200 years.
This is a large work, which has been scaled down, that these
days would be played by an orchestra of 100. And what you
find out, when you play it as a quintet, is that one of its
purposes of that was to have a lot of fun and social
interaction.”
Dr November’s research will also
involve exploring how these domestic arrangements
contributed to the canonisation of our most renowned
musicians. “Beethoven would have done quite well through
these arrangements, in the dissemination of his music, in
this take-home form. It helped broadcast his name, and kept
his repertoire alive in an era before people were more
easily able to go to public concerts.”
Creativity has a
way of combatting isolation, she adds. “For women that
were in the home all day, playing these arrangements was an
opportunity for sociability, even having almost physical
contact with the opposite sex, in a permissible space. So it
allowed for a very interesting social space, full of
possibilities, maybe even a bit of
transgression.”
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