Rebecca Cypess's "Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment"

Rebecca Cypess is associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the author of Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy.

Cypess applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, and reported the following:

Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment is about the extraordinary musicianship of a group of women who hosted social–musical gatherings in eighteenth-century Europe and colonial North America. At a time when few women had access to a formal education and when women’s roles in the public sphere were limited, these women used their musical salons to gain an education and have an impact on their broader musical environment.

Page 99 of my book is about the analogy between music and conversation. Both of these were central to the experience of musical salons: the salon hostess and her guests would play, sing, and listen to music together, and they alternated those experiences with commentary, eating and drinking, playing games, and other social activities. One of these salon hostesses was Suzanne Necker, whom I quote on page 99: “One of the charms of the spirit and of conversation is to be able to bend to the spirit, to proper love, and to the ideas of others, in waves, if one may use the expression, and like the accompaniment in music.” For Necker, musicians must learn to accommodate each other politely and artfully, just as conversationalists must do.

This idea is important to my book, but it doesn’t represent the whole story. Necker’s words about the analogy between conversation and music are rather vague. I’m interested in digging more deeply, and with greater detail, into the specific kinds of music-making that happened in salons. The book engages with compositions by women, their collections of musical scores, their letters, their diaries, and their performance practices, as well as specific observations that were made about them by some of the many visitors—both men and women—who attended their salons. Crucially, the book also features a companion website with audio examples that I made myself (I’m a historical keyboardist and director of the Raritan Players) as a way of trying out some of the salon performance practices that I was encountering. Those more detailed engagements with women and musical salons are more important to me than Necker’s generalization, interesting as it is.

Learn more about Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue