Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord. By Candace Bailey

Abstract

A shelf of untapped, bound musical scores, with single family ownership, is one of the most enticing discoveries for a musicologist. Candace Bailey introduces a treasure trove. Such collections can preserve forgotten works and tell us much about their elite owners; both their individual predilections and the tastes and fashions of their times are displayed. In her previous work (Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (Carbondale, Ill., 2010)), Bailey made the case for the importance of music in shaping the ornamental and accomplished ‘Southern Belle’ before the Civil War. There is a growing corpus of hermeneutic scholarship on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British domestic music collections as well as, more recently, those in historic Australian houses, but this study is set in the southern United States, where some valuable academic musical and social study has been generated. Charleston, South Carolina, during the latter half of the Antebellum period (1820s to the Civil War of 1861), was among the ten largest cities in the USA, according to the 1840 census.