Sounding the Salon

Sounding the Salon
Through historically-informed musical performance, photographs and archival texts, this digital resource explores the Victorian salon as an alternative musical space outside conservatories and large public venues. We aim better to understand the history of the rise of sociability in relation to art forms (creation, distribution, intertextuality), the impact of musical performance on people’s lives and other art forms, and the influence of marginal identities (women, queer, Jewish). Recovering this history involves studying how people related to each other, to and through sound. Because salons were an early manifestation of networking now experienced in social media, this scholarship ultimately presents a new way of conceptualizing the growth of modernity. Co-PIs: Sophie Fuller (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance [London]) and Phyllis Weliver (Saint Louis University). Co-I: Christina Bashford (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This site is not yet live.