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R. Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener. English Representations of Domestic Music-Making

R. Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener. English Representations of Domestic Music-Making

Publié le par Sophie Rabau

Regula HOHLTRILLINI, The Gaze ofthe Listener. EnglishRepresentations of Domestic Music-Making. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, coll. "Wordand Music Studies" n°10, 2008, XI-249 p.

  • Isbn 13 (ean):978-90-420-2489-2

Présentation de l'éditeur :

This studyanalyzes representations of music in fiction, drama and poetry as well asnormative texts in order to contribute to a gendered cultural history ofdomestic performance. From the Tudors to the First World War, playing theharpsichord or piano was an indispensable asset of any potential bride, andeducation manuals as well as courtship plots and love poems pay homage to thissocial function of music. The Gaze of the Listener charts the fundamentaltension which determines all these texts: while music is warmly recommended inconduct books and provides standard metaphors like "concord" and "harmony" forvirtuous love, a profound anxiety about its sensuous inarticulateness andimplicit femininity unsettles all descriptions of actual music-making. Alongwith repressive plot lines, the privileging of visual perception over musicalappreciation is the most telling indicator of this problem. The Gaze of theListener is the first coherent account of this discourse and its historicalcontinuity from the Elizabethan to the Edwardian period and provides asignificant background for more narrowly focused research. Its uniquely widedatabase contextualizes numerous "minor" works with classics without limitingitself to the fringe phenomenon of "musician novels". Including a fresh accountof the novels of Jane Austen in their contemporary (rather than Victorian)context, the book is of interest to scholars and students in gender studies,English literature, cultural studies and musicology.

Table

Introduction

Sex and theVirginals: Gender and Keyboards around 1600

“Musick inthe House, Musick in the Heart, and Musick also in Heaven”: The Harpsichord

“Accomplishments,Accomplishments, Accomplishments”: The Piano-Forté

“Gloriousdisability”: The Piano and the Mid-Victorians

Triumph andOblivion: The Piano after 1880

Conclusion

References

L'Auteur

Regula HohlTrillini is a lecturer in English literature at the Universityof Basel and a trained pianist. Besides Word-and-Music studies,she has published articles on intertextuality and Shakespeare receptionand edits the HyperHamlet database (www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch).

Article en ligne (revue Music & Letters):  The Gaze of the Listener: Shakespeare's Sonnet 128 and Early Modern Discourses of Music and Gender