Cultural Subtexts and Social Functions of Domestic Music-Making in Jane Austen's England
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Masters Theses Dissertations and Theses July 2016 Cultural Subtexts and Social Functions of Domestic Music-making in Jane Austen’s England Lidia A. Chang University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2 Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Musicology Commons, and the Music Performance Commons Recommended Citation Chang, Lidia A., "Cultural Subtexts and Social Functions of Domestic Music-making in Jane Austen’s England" (2016). Masters Theses. 340. https://doi.org/10.7275/8414312 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/340 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CULTURAL SUBTEXTS AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC MUSIC- MAKING IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND A Thesis Presented by LIDIA A. CHANG Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF MUSIC May 2016 Historical Musicology CULTURAL SUBTEXTS AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC MUSIC- MAKING IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND A Thesis Presented by LIDIA A. CHANG Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________ Marianna Ritchey, Chair _____________________________ Ernest May, Member _________________________________ Jeff Cox, Department Chair Department of Music and Dance ABSTRACT CULTURAL SUBTEXTS AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC MUSIC- MAKING IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND MAY 2016 LIDIA CHANG, B.A., ENTER UNIV NAME HERE M.M., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Marianna Ritchey Barring a few notable exceptions, English music between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries earns scant notice in music history textbooks, despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture, especially during the Georgian era. However, I will argue that the English of this period were, in many respects, even more committed to music than their continental counterparts. The problem, for England, was not that it made no music during this period, but that it made the wrong kind of music, and enjoyed it in the wrong ways. At a time when Germanic critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx were establishing grand, large-scale musical masterpieces (and the singular geniuses who created them) as the highest form of art, the English prioritized musical process over the musical work, and remained committed to music that could be played and enjoyed socially, in drawing rooms. I argue that England’s absence from the standard music history is due to three primary social issues: England’s complex and longstanding cultural anxieties regarding music’s supposed ability to feminize men and empower women; the invisibility of England’s most musical citizens (women); and a vibrant culture of domestic music-making (dominated by women) that was incompatible with the new aesthetic values of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which placed greater importance on the autonomous musical product than the malleable musical process. iii CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL SUBTEXTS AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC MUSIC-MAKING IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND .....................1 CHAPTER 1. MATERIAL EVIDENCE ................................................................................................6 2. CONDUCT MANUALS ...............................................................................................14 3. MUSIC IN AUSTEN’S NOVELS.................................................................................24 4. MUSIC FROM AUSTEN’S COLLECTION ................................................................42 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................58 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................60 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. CHWJA/19/1 Handel Concerto in B flat major, HWV 290 ...........................................45 2. “William” JA/19/3 .........................................................................................................47 3. “Oh Nanny” JA/19/3 ......................................................................................................48 4. “Heaving of the Land” JA/19/3 .....................................................................................49 5. “From Night ‘til Morn I take my Glass” JA/19/3 ..........................................................50 6. Title page of Sterckel Sonatas, JA/19/5 .........................................................................53 7. “The Irishman” JA/19/3 .................................................................................................55 v INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL SUBTEXTS AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC MUSIC- MAKING IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND “I hope somebody cares for these minutiae,” Jane Austen once wrote to her sister, making fun of herself for filling a lengthy letter with every detail of a long journey.1 This self-deprecating parenthetical could be the tag line for any one of her novels, all of which revel in recounting the every-day concerns of every-day people. Though her novels are widely considered classic works of fiction, their subject matter has led to them being grouped with novels by other female authors under the banner of “Women’s literature,” a sort of “special interest” genre, which, as a whole, is often overlooked as “minutiae” in the grand narrative of literary history. Although Harold Bloom groups Austen with the likes of Tolstoy and Proust as one of the greatest novelists in The Western Canon, her inclusion – unlike Tolstoy’s, for example – has nothing to do with the content of her novels and everything to do with the artistry of her novels despite the “narrowness” of their subject matter. Indeed, it would seem that her place in the canon has been contingent on the assumptions of critics since the 1820’s that Austen was happy to write within the prescribed “feminine” boundaries and never presumed or aspired to do more. 2 1 Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 20 May 1813. Jane Austen’s Letters, Ed. Deirdre LeFaye, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 210. 2 For a detailed history of the reception and criticism of Austen through the nineteenth century see Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and for a delightful analysis of the resulting “myth of limitation” pervasive in Austen criticism see Donald Greene’s, “The Myth of Limitation,” in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975) 142-175. 1 It is through no fault of Austen’s that the content of her novels has been seen as a limitation to her genius; rather, it is indicative of a widespread cultural tendency to value the perspectives of men more highly than those of women. Virginia Woolf explores this tendency at length in A Room of One’s Own: And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life […] Yet it is the masculine values that prevail […] And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop--everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.3 Woolf’s description of the disregard for the “small” focus of women’s literature could also be used to describe the traditional disregard, in music history, of nineteenth- century English music, which has been similarly relegated to the sidelines of the canonical “metanarrative.” Despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture during the long eighteenth century, the standard music history textbooks would have us believe that after the death of Henry Purcell the English gave up on music altogether, and that by the late eighteenth century they had to import all of their musicians and composers from Germany and Italy. I argue, however, that the problem was not that the English made no music but rather that they made the wrong kind of music. Austen’s descriptions of musical scenes in her novels will serve as a point of convergence for the various kinds of evidence that I will use to support this claim. During the time when the performance canon was being set, German music theorists such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx – whose philosophies increasingly 3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1929) 73- 74. 2 came to dominate continental musical ideals – valued grand, large-scale musical masterpieces and the singular geniuses who composed them.4 The English, on the other hand, favored music that could be played and enjoyed in their drawing rooms, prioritizing the musical process over the