18th century
19th century
A01=Matthew Head
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art
Author_Matthew Head
authorial autonomy
automatic-update
beauty
bourgeois ideal
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVGC4
Category=AVLA
Category=JBSF1
Category=JFSJ1
classical
classical music
commercial culture
COP=United States
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engaging
eq_art-fashion-photography
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eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
female composers
female excellence
female musicians
femininity
feminocentric values
fine arts
gender studies
german states
Language_English
luxury
masterworks
music
musical
musical canons
musical composers
musical history
musical performers
PA=Available
patriotism
performing arts
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
refinement
sensibility
sex
social issues
softlaunch
virtue
womens history
womens issues
Product details
- ISBN 9780520273849
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 May 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity - a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal - linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art.
In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.
Matthew Head is a Reader in Music at King's College London. He is the author of Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart's Turkish Music (2000).
