The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music

Historians who try to eavesdrop upon everyday music-making are constantly thwarted by the patchiness of the documentary evidence. It is also unclear how much those meagre records can be taken as representative of wider tendencies. Marie Sumner Lott is all too aware that private performance is poorly documented; thus, at the opening of this study, she cautions that ‘it is important to note what we can and cannot know and what we must infer from a variety of incomplete, sometimes contradictory sources’ (p. 6). Her aim is to reinsert the middle-class musical amateur into our account of nineteenth-century string chamber music, and thereby to experience the central works of the repertory anew, as well as to shed light on its darker corners. Recent years have seen various endeavours to explore informal music-making. The Listening Experience Database (http://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/), for instance, is an ‘open and freely searchable database that brings together a mass of data about people’s experiences of listening to music of all kinds, in any historical period and any culture’. Other studies shift the focus away from works to usage and meaning, such as Wiebke Thormählen’s ‘Lamenting at the Piano: Domestic Music-making and Well-being in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ (Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, 15 (2014), 144–60); or, from a different historical era, Zoe Lang’s essay, ‘Creating a War Repertoire: Musik für Alle and Domestic Music during the First World War’ (Journal of Musicological Research, 33 (2014), 206–40); or Marek Korczynski’s Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance (Ithaca, NY, 2014). Still others take a central figure or body of repertory as their focus, such as Katy Hamilton’s and my co-edited volume Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2014), to which Lott has contributed a chapter. In the context of Lott’s study, Christina Bashford’s geographically and temporally defined work on chamber music is highly relevant (‘Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 291–359).

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