“Leisure with Decorum”: Gentlemen Making Music in the Georgian era
This project examines the musical activities of Georgian gentlemen with the goal of illustrating the ways that recreational music-making tested the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. While the English nobility could respectably engage in music-making, socialize with professional musicians (subverting, or temporarily suspending otherwise rigid class boundaries), and openly extol the virtues of Continental culture without compromising their gentlemanliness, English gentlemen walked a much thinner line. In pursuit of these claims I will expand the scope of primary sources beyond conduct books and novels to include selections of unpublished, peripheral accounts of recreational music-making as found in letters, diaries, printed and handwritten music books, amateur drawings, and other unconventional sources. By basing my investigation on materials that are not often examined for their combined musical and sociohistorical content, I shed new light on the largely invisible musical practices of Georgian gentlemen.
Digital Humanities, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Musicology, Music Practice, Georgian era, England, Music, Gender, Performance Practice, Organology
City University of New York - Graduate Center
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York