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.

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.

Fanny Hensel inherited a tradition of powerful salonnières and redefined it for her time. She navigated gendered constraints on her music career via her Sonntagsmusiken, which were private yet highly curated performances that prioritized music just as much as conversation. Hensel’s social and religious concerns shaped many of her choices, initially confining her to informal settings and to a secondary role as her parents launched her brother’s career. However, her early exposure to Berlin’s elite musical circles allowed her to analyze areas for improvement in Berlin’s musical culture, and she embarked on a mission to raise the level of musical excellence and taste in her circle. This study examines key milestones in Hensel’s journey, highlighting shifts in the number of performers, performance formats, genres, and complexity. Hensel’s evolving approach to musical gatherings reflected broader nineteenth-century tensions between domesticity and professionalization, and shaped her eventual legacy far beyond her Berlin salon.

Women in mid-nineteenth-century Madrid participated in salon culture as a means of social mobility and musical expression, navigating both the opportunities and constraints of gender norms. As salons expanded beyond aristocratic circles into the bourgeoisie, music became a key marker of cultural refinement and an avenue for female participation in public and semiprivate artistic spaces. Institutions like the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid provided performance opportunities, though women also faced criticism for their growing visibility. Figures such as Paulina Cabrero exemplified the dual role of women as performers and composers, blurring boundaries between domestic leisure and public recognition. Personal albums, inscribed with musical compositions, poetry, and dedications, serve as vital sources for understanding salon culture’s influence on female artistic agency. Examining these albums alongside periodicals and historical accounts, this study situates salon culture within Spain’s broader sociopolitical transformations, highlighting its impact on women’s musical production, education, and cultural expression.

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.

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.