Emily Dickinson's Music Book and the Musical Life of an American Poet by George Boziwick (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emily Dickinson's Music Book and the Musical Life of an American Poet by George Boziwick Katrina Dzyak Emily Dickinson's Music Book and the Musical Life of an American Poet. By George Boziwick. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022. [xv, 266 p. ISBN 9781625346605 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9781625346599 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9781613769379 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, digital supplement at https://umpressopen.library.umass.edu/projects/emily-dickinsons-music-book (accessed 19 March 2023). For literary scholars, Emily Dickinson is many things in addition to being a poet. In scholarly studies, the poet anticipates neuroscience and technical conversations about the structure and functioning of the brain—the noun she prefers to the "mind." She is a chemist whose descriptions of fire and heat indicate a critical attention to energy sources and their durability. Variously devout and irreverent, Dickinson is hermeneutical, actively pondering theology, its affordances, and its horrors. The poet is a philosopher, mechanizing her thinking into a practice whose aim is nothing short of sublimity, or otherwise just clarity. In all these studies, the subject of Emily Dickinson starts and stops with poetry, her ranging interest motivating and honing her literary practice. On the one hand, because of her social position within a White upper-middleclass family with politically influential members, it is little surprise that Dickinson would have had access to an array of disciplines, whether through an extensive in-house library or in colloquy with scholarly family friends who were often visiting. On the other hand, the broad intellectual horizons available to Dickinson mean that her reading outside of poetry and poiesis had to be selective, her references less a consequence of ideas abstractly wafting in the air and more an intentional practice of study and application. Indeed, amidst such convincing literary scholarship, one cannot but gradually wonder whether the ballast of poetry in readings of Dickinson's life and works might occasionally displace other of her practices and passions. George Boziwick's Emily Dickinson's Music Book and the Musical Life of an American Poet introduces Dickinson, first and foremost, through music. "In Dickinson's early years, music occupied a significant place in her daily life" (p. 1), Boziwick opens, suggesting not just the presence of music in the poet's history, but that for a significant stretch of time, Dickinson studied, reflected on, and performed music as an end in itself. Evidence for Boziwick's claim comes from the 107 pieces of sheet music that Dickinson collected, organized, and bound into a music book, taking after nineteenth-century trends in which young women trained in music theory and performance, and at various points curated repertoires that showcased their developing tastes. Boziwick identifies three features that make Dickinson's music book distinctive, however, and thus warranting it especial study, regardless of her later stature. First, Dickinson's music book is more than double the length commonly maintained. Rather than a balance in entries, Dickinson largely privileged instrumental over vocal arrangements. Across these instrumental selections, finally, Dickinson gathered a range of genres still, from opera overtures to fiddle tunes, intersecting musics across class, race, and occasion. Emily Dickinson's Music Book expands our approach to Dickinson's artistic and intellectual pursuits by centering its [End Page 634] focus on this decided record of her investment in music study. For Boziwick, Dickinson made use of the music book not to fulfill gender expectations per se nor to troubleshoot any conceptual or aesthetic problem that would ultimately be channeled through poetry, but to take up music in its myriad iterations as it appeared in nineteenth-century New England. Reading this object as a record of a resolute musician, Boziwick goes cover to cover and locates its apparent phases within specific and social histories. The first several chapters immerse readers in scenes from public schools where students like Dickinson were routinely introduced to music and encouraged to make progress in the discipline. Reconstructing the seminary movement, in particular, in which a number of female academies in New England began offering music and arts education alongside traditional training in domestic skills, Boziwick in chapter 2 makes connections between select repertoires associated with this radical period and Dickinson...