Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780-1850

Author:   David Kennerley (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Queen Mary University of London)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN:  

9780190097561


Pages:   240
Publication Date:   21 July 2020
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780-1850


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Overview

"Between 1780 and 1850, the growing prominence of female singers in Britain's professional and amateur spheres opened a fraught discourse about women's engagement with musical culture. Protestant evangelical gender ideology framed the powerful, well-trained, and expressive female voice as a sign of inner moral corruption, while more restrained and delicate vocal styles were seen as indicative of the performer's virtuous femininity. Yet far from everyone was of this persuasion, and those from alternative class and religious milieux responded in more affirmative ways to the sound of professional female voices. The meanings listeners ascribed to women's voices reflect crucial developments in the musical world of the period, such as the popularity of particular genres with audiences of certain social backgrounds, and the reasons underpinning the development of prevalent types of nineteenth-century professional female vocality.Sounding Feminine traces the development of attitudes towards the female voice that have decisively shaped modern British society and culture. Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of the past, author David Kennerley draws from a variety of fields-including sound studies, sensory histories, and gender theory-to examine how audiences heard different kinds of femininities in the voices of British female singers. Sounding Feminine explores the intense divisions over the ""correct"" use of the female voice, and the intricate links between gender, nationality, class, and religion in ascribing status, purpose, and morality to female singing. Through this lens, Kennerley also explores the formation of British middle-class identities and the cultural impact of the evangelical revival-deepening our understanding of this period of transformational change in British culture."

Full Product Details

Author:   David Kennerley (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Queen Mary University of London)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 24.20cm
Weight:   0.480kg
ISBN:  

9780190097561


ISBN 10:   0190097566
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   21 July 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Sounding Feminine Chapter 1: Instructing women's voices in conduct literature Chapter 2: Encountering women's voices in letters, diaries, and life-writing Chapter 3: Criticising women's voices in the musical press Chapter 4: Dorothea Solly's musical world: Class, religion, and the cultivation of the female voice Chapter 5: The lives and voices of professional female singers: three vignettes Epilogue: Voicing a new femininity Bibliography Index

Reviews

One of the most important books on this topic to have emerged in recent years. David Kennerley's sensitivity to different kinds of evidence offers an important corrective to some earlier volumes on the topic, indeed it's an object lesson on how to write histories of the human voice in song. * Roger Parker, King's College London * David Kennerley's Sounding Feminine offers us a new, and exciting way of thinking about crucial questions of constructions of gender and music in the early Victorian period. It is a deeply informed, carefully researched, and engaging book and will be a very welcome addition to the field. * Mark Philp, University of Warwick *


David Kennerley's Sounding Feminine offers us a new, and exciting way of thinking about crucial questions of constructions of gender and music in the early Victorian period. It is a deeply informed, carefully researched, and engaging book and will be a very welcome addition to the field. * Mark Philp, University of Warwick * One of the most important books on this topic to have emerged in recent years. David Kennerley's sensitivity to different kinds of evidence offers an important corrective to some earlier volumes on the topic, indeed it's an object lesson on how to write histories of the human voice in song. * Roger Parker, King's College London *


Author Information

David Kennerley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Queen Mary University of London. He specializes in the history of music, sound, gender, and political culture in modern Britain. His work has been published in the Historical Journal, the English Historical Review, and the Journal of British Studies, and, with Oskar Cox Jensen and Ian Newman, he has co-edited Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (OUP, 2018).

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