Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South by Candace Bailey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South by Candace Bailey Michele Aichele Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Candace Bailey. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. [ix, 292 p. ISBN 9780252085741 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780252043758 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9780252052651 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Candace Bailey’s Unbinding Gentility is an important examination of women’s musical practices in the southern United States from 1830 to 1880. It expands on Bailey’s previous publications, Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019), by including nonelite White women as well as Black women, both free and enslaved, in the South. The title Unbinding Gentility plays on the main type of source Bailey used: bound volumes of music, known as “binder’s volumes,” collections of individually published or copied sheet music that were bound together. Such collect ions allowed women to demonstrate their class status and were markers of gentility. “A binder’s volume standing on a piano desk or even lying on a piece of furniture,” Bailey observes, “proclaimed that a young woman had been properly brought up” (p. 12). Many of the more than fifteen-hundred binder’s volumes Bailey investigated include annot ations with notes from friends and family, dates, ornaments, fingerings, and translations of foreign-language songs, all of which demonstrate that the music was used. Studies of women’s music-making practices in the nineteenth century are becoming more common, and the inclusion of Black women in this study begins to fill a huge gap in music studies. With this scholarship, Bailey demonstrates how the performance of gentility varied across race, class, and time, showing the complex social changes in Southern women’s lives from before the Civil War through Reconstruction. The introduction contextualizes Bailey’s research in nineteenth-century histories and studies of music. Bailey dispels notions of strict binaries in musical practices to show a wide spectrum of practices and social change. Her goal is “to recover silent voices and position them within the social world of which they were so much a part” (p. 1). Unbinding Gentility is divided into five [End Page 236] parts: the first three focus on the ante-bellum period, part 4 examines musical practices during the Civil War, and part 5 discusses the changes in performances of gentility and music in the Reconstruction period. Part 1, “Social Diversity among Amateur Women Musicians,” consists of two chapters that set up the musical practices of amateur White women and women of color. While chapter 1 re-hashes some familiar material about White women performing gentility at the parlor piano, the inclusion of women of color performing gentility at the piano in their own parlors provides further nuance to how ideals of feminine gentility crossed racial lines. Due to the scope of Bailey’s research, she cannot provide us with all the details we would want, but she encourages future scholars to continue her work and interrogate the meaning and agency of Black feminine genteel performances at the piano. In part 2, “Repertory,” Bailey examines the common repertoire included in binder’s volumes in the antebellum period, demonstrating the variety contained within the term parlor music. The most common genres include English ballads, arrangements of theater and operatic works, arias from contemporary operas, dance music, and variations on popular and operatic melodies. The main differences in repertoire between classes had to do with the difficulty of the arrangements. Some elite women, who had ample time and resources to dedicate to their music studies, owned technically difficult arrangements and variations and sang bel canto arias in their original keys and languages. Women without as much means played simplified versions of similar music and typically sang English translations of arias. Contrary to what we usually assume in US music history, the songs of Stephen Foster and minstrelsy barely make appearances in these binder’s volumes. When minstrelsy pieces did appear, dialect and...