Based on the experiences of Viennese salonnière and writer Caroline Pichler (1769–1843), this chapter examines key aspects of nineteenth-century salon culture: intergenerational transmission of salon activities, the merging of literary and musical interests, and the interplay between female agency and cross-gender inspiration. To expand our understanding of salon culture in the Habsburg Empire, it explores cultural intersections between Vienna and Prague. The chapter is structured into four sections: an overview of Pichler’s salon in Vienna, her cultural engagement in Prague, her Prague contacts in Vienna, and traces of her influence in Prague’s musical repertoire. It concludes that Pichler significantly contributed to salon culture in both cities, highlighting the role of private and semiprivate spaces in fostering and disseminating literary and musical works across regions.

This chapter explores the understudied role of music in Dutch private social life during the long nineteenth century. Examining a wide variety of cases and sources, it reveals that many of the country’s diversified early modern private musical practices persisted until the outbreak of the First World War. The chapter shows how music functioned as social and cultural capital in the way it shaped the agendas and identities of both hosts and guests. By tracing contemporaries’ expectations and experiences related to the social functions of music, the study highlights how they internalized intersecting societal ideas with regards to social groups. It shows that the Dutch were divided into various emotional-musical communities that shared emotional as well as musical norms, preferences, and behaviors. Uncovering processes of social exclusion as a key characteristic of Dutch private music sociability, the chapter concludes that “salons” were not as harmless as often assumed.

Sephardi women in the Mediterranean, whose vocality was primarily confined to private spaces, used singing in situations of danger as a beacon to deploy networked connections of protection. Before the heritagization of Judeo-Spanish repertoire in the late twentieth century following massive emigrations from the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans, female Sephardi voices were deployed as a manner of portable salon. This chapter demonstrates how women used their voices, and the cultural capital embedded within communicative functions of timbre, affect, volume, and silence to resist sexual aggression, assault, and coercion. Using two case studies from urban Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish, one from Bulgaria and the other from Morocco, this chapter unpacks how this intersectional minority deployed voice as a powerful creator of enclosed and safeguarding space. In these cases, women’s voices pushed their traditionally inner salons outwards, enacting a vocal protective shield semiotically prevalent in Sephardi communities.

From 1986 until March 2020, the salon of the Philadelphia-based pianist and composer Andrea Clearfield met in her home each month without fail. Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and arts events around the world were abruptly canceled, as artists and audiences retreated to a state of solitude. In March 2020, Clearfield was forced to suspend her salon for the first time. Soon after, however, Clearfield’s gatherings resumed in another form. A group of friends, led by the music technologist and composer Adam Vidiksis and lead engineer Gerardo Razumney, together with a technical team of around ten volunteers, helped her to create an online, live, and interactive environment through the Zoom videoconferencing platform that would simulate some aspects of the salon that she had hosted in person for so many years. Clearfield then created hybrid gatherings that she dubbed “SZalons,” borrowing the “Z” from “Zoom” to distinguish them from her in-person salon events. While the online medium had some limitations, it opened new possibilities for Clearfield, her audiences, and the performers who present their work there. Through analysis of an interview with Clearfield and some of the hybrid performances that took place in the early days of the SZalon, this chapter suggests that Clearfield created the SZalon as a proactive, hopeful reaction to the overwhelmingly difficult circumstances of the COVID pandemic. Building on her existing network of musical sociability, Clearfield was able to use the Zoom platform to create a new geography of home that seeks to balance the intimacy of the salon with the quest for global connection through music.

This chapter explores the relationship between women’s abolitionism and the musical salon in eighteenth-century Britain. In the absence of written sources describing musical salons that promoted abolitionism, I search for musical evidence of this phenomenon – in the form of two piano-vocal scores. Each is a setting of William Cowper’s celebrated antislavery poem, “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788). The first setting is by an anonymous amateur composer, whom I identify as Miss Greenwood. Greenwood’s choice to publish her song in The Lady’s Magazine speaks to contemporary assumptions about women’s taste for antislavery songs, poems, and stories. The second setting, by professional composer John Wall Callcott, confirms that such songs were indeed popular with women in this period. I explore four copies of this score, which were included in British women’s personal music collections in the late eighteenth century. These important sources contain hard-to-find traces of women’s musical engagement with the abolitionist cause.

The thriving musical culture of the mid to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is addressed in this chapter. It examines the Vormärz, Revolution and Nachmärz (1830–60), Liberal Vienna (1860–97), the fin de siècle to the end of the Empire (1897–1918), Red Vienna (1919–34) and the years preceding the Anschluss (1938). The Viennese products of luminaries such as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Anton Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky are considered alongside those of less well-known Viennese figures from this period.

This chapter describes the Viennese Volkstheater, a forerunner of operetta, and then sketches the historical development of operetta in city life from the late 1850s into the twenty-first century, including the ‘golden’ and ‘silver’ ages. Since operetta is closely tied to popular music, types such as social dancing, military bands, cabaret and the musical are also referenced.

Drum and bass is one of the fastest electronic dance music (EDM) genres to achieve significant cultural attention, often running in excess of 170 BPM (beats-per-minute); around twice the speed of the soul and funk records from which its ‘breaks’ are sourced. Its emergence via dance clubs and raves in the deindustrialised spaces of inner-city London during the early 1990s points to an interrelationship between the stratified experience of speed in an accelerated culture and the effects of post-industrialisation on the genre’s mainly urban and working-class participants, many of whom have been socially and geographically immobilised by the fast and fluid transactions of deterritorialised techno-capital. This chapter considers the role of drum and bass as both a form of cultural resistance within underground EDM against the socially deleterious effects of an accelerated culture, while palpably embracing the jouissance produced by speed in its sonic and wider cultural contexts.

One important reason why opera has been so resilient in Vienna is that its institutional framework has proved at once relatively stable and adaptable to change. This chapter traces the development of opera’s institutional history in Vienna. It discusses the city’s opera houses, their administration and repertoires, teasing out the relationship between their political, social and cultural function from the seventeenth century to the present.

This study explores the role of musical salons in nineteenth-century Mexico as dynamic spaces where gender, sociability, and national identity intersected. Salons functioned as transitional domestic arenas where elite women played a central role in music making, shaping both cultural tastes and national sentiment. While largely absent from traditional music histories, these spaces were crucial to the circulation and performance of European and Mexican music, fostering artistic exchange among amateurs and professionals. Through tertulias (soirées), women exercised agency in defining musical and social conventions despite being constrained by patriarchal norms. Drawing on historical accounts, literary sources, and travelers’ testimonies, this work highlights the importance of salons as sites of gendered musical practice, elite cosmopolitanism, and identity formation in post-independence Mexico. It also underscores the need for a revised historiographical approach that integrates women’s contributions to the broader narrative of Latin American music history.

The Introduction surveys the existing literature on musical salons and related institutions from cross-cultural perspectives, laying out the need for the present volume and placing it within the landscape of existing scholarship in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines. It also provides a flexible, working definition of musical salons and related practices from c. 1600 to the present day. It provides a summary of each chapter in the volume.