Vienna’s musical heritage is defined not solely by its composers and performers but also by an impressive array of distinctive instruments that have emanated from the city. This chapter delves into the variety of sound bodies that have shaped the city’s sonic environment: mechanical clocks with music, bells, string, keyboard and wind instruments, as well as their unique Viennese modifications. Designed and produced specifically for and/or in Vienna, they reflect the needs of their time and materialize the creative ideas of then-manufacturers, serve as popular tourist attractions or curiosities and transmit symbolic or social meaning.

This chapter analyzes how a network of discourses, sounds, images, and behaviors conveyed content in Colombian salons during the nineteenth century, producing a “world of meaning.” To do this, I study the salon as a part of a civilizing project, exploring how it articulated gender and musical practice under new forms of sociability while examining masculinity and femininity roles introduced and performed within the salon, often using music and dance as means for fostering social interaction among peers. Ultimately, such analysis suggests that the salon became a musical scene that played a prominent role in social reform as a medium for bridging multiple social class and distinction discourses with new ideas about civilization, modernization, social order, and progress. From this standpoint, salons became semiprivate spaces where music and socialization allowed the members of the new Colombian urban bourgeoisie to articulate their visions of the private and the public spheres.

In 1849–50, Étienne Duverger co-edited La Violette: Revue musicale et littéraire in New Orleans. He published this feuilleton with an aim to instill the idea of the Parisian salon among women in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and he encouraged them to adopt a new repertoire (Chopin) and a new stance (in the public gaze rather than out of it). In other words, he urged them to come out of the shadows (where violets hide) and into a broader light. His efforts, however, failed. This essay argues that while the rising domination of US-American culture (over that of the French) contributed to the breakdown of Duverger’s mission, the data that can be gleaned from this publication provides the most detailed account of salon activities in the South, and possibly the entire nation. Thus, La Violette proves invaluable as a resource for women’s musical culture in this period.

This chapter addresses the nightclub as an architectural typology. It will consider what the Italian architect Carlo Caldini, co-designer and owner of Florence’s Space Electronic nightclub (1969–2017), called the nightclub’s ‘inexistent architecture’ - in other words, the importance of sound and light over bricks and mortar in the design of club spaces. This was echoed by the critic Aaron Betsky who described a design of ‘rhythm and light’ (Queer Space, 1997) in his description of New York’s iconic Studio 54. The discussion further considers a range of nightclubs from the late twentieth century including Rome’s Piper club, Florence’s Space Electronic, and Electric Circus, Studio 54, Area, and Palladium in New York. In addition, it brings in other voices from architecture, design and music – including Simon Reynolds’ concept of the ‘affective charge’, to position design and architecture as a key realm in electronic dance music culture.

The early nineteenth century, approximately 1800–48, is the focus of this chapter. Through consideration of historical sources, it enters the early nineteenth-century Viennese home, finding out what was played, who was playing, with what skill and why. It examines the centrality of the piano and the string quartet and the identity and status of musical dilettantes.

In an attempt to demonstrate the scale, scope and orientation of Viennese commemorations of its musicians, this chapter examines funerals and graves, anniversary festivities and physical monuments, demonstrating how the city positions itself at the front and centre of commemorative activities. It focuses on Viennese fascination with death, the funerals and reburials of Beethoven, Strauss Sr, Strauss Jr and Schubert, anniversary celebrations for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and statues erected of the city’s great musicians, often in controversial circumstances.

This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

In the early seventeenth century, female singers were novelties, objects of obsession to be admired, collected, and displayed. Heard only seldom in opera (until the establishment of Venetian public opera) and forbidden from singing in church, they performed primarily in private and semiprivate settings, inspiring their male admirers to write poems and discourses that variously praised and condemned their alluring voices and bodies. A comparison of Barbara Strozzi’s performances with the Venetian Accademia degli Unisoni with those of her antecedents and contemporaries (such as Adriana Basile or Leonora Baroni) in Papal Rome reveals fundamental differences in attitudes towards virtuose: the political structure in Venice that limited public roles for noblewomen created an environment discouraged the development of conversazioni and veglie – many of which were sponsored by female patrons – that the Roman women enjoyed. Giulio Strozzi’s founding of the Accademia degli Unisoni may well have been inspired by his experiences hearing female singers during his time in Rome.

This chapter evaluates the subject of ethnographic material in Viennese music, recognizing that those who defined the Viennese perspective, composing and performing music in Vienna, were very often men from elsewhere, attracted by the opportunities of the imperial capital. It examines Ottoman operatic subjects and Turkish Janissary style, Viennese ethnography (including as integrated into classical style), folk songs, Hungarian-Roma influences and style, musical nationalism and ethnographic repertory at the Vienna Opera.

This chapter explores the rich yet understudied tradition of salon music making in Vienna around 1800, positioning it as a crucial counterpart to the emerging public concert culture. While historical narratives have emphasized the establishment of the classical canon in public performance spaces, this chapter highlights the private and semiprivate salon gatherings that flourished in response to sociopolitical constraints, including censorship and war. By examining memoirs, publishing catalogues, and iconography, the study reveals how salons sustained an abiding taste for operatic arrangements in intimate settings. Viennese salons, while influenced by French traditions, developed distinct characteristics, particularly in their emphasis on men’s leadership, class exclusivity, and music’s centrality. The chapter also considers gendered performance practices, the impact of sociopolitical shifts post-1815, and the evolution of salon repertoire. By tracing the adaptation of public works for private settings, this study repositions salons as vital spaces of musical engagement and cultural continuity.

Among the Jewish salonnières of post-Napoleonic Berlin, Amalie Beer (1767–1854) was one of the few to remain a committed Jew throughout her life. The home where she regularly entertained her friends and musical celebrities was also host to a popular yet controversial Sabbath service known as the Beer Temple, an early attempt to align Jewish worship more closely with the surrounding German culture. This essay investigates points of contact and exchange between the Beer Temple and the salon of Amalie Beer, placing the aesthetics of the musical salon in conversation with “bourgeois Judaism” and early Jewish reform. Though the organ, choir, and chorales characteristic of the Beer Temple are commonly framed as adaptations of contemporary Lutheran practice, I find that the Temple was equally marked by its parallels with the salon – not only its domestic location, but its visual trappings, sociability, gender politics, and musical functions.