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 Julia Nitz Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Candace Bailey. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 292. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08574-1; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04375-8.) This volume is admirable in its ambition to capture the role southern amateur women played in American musical history, or, as the author puts it, to tell the "history of women in the nineteenth-century U.S. South . . . through the medium of music" (p. 4). Candace Bailey critiques past studies that considered women's musical artifacts and practices "ephemera," a misplaced notion shared by musicologists and cultural historians alike, and she strives to overcome traditional, male-centric narratives "that prejudice composer and title over circulation and performance" (p. 2). Bailey's book "encompasses music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory in order to understand music's meaning in women's culture of the South" (p. 3). Thus, she recharts southern musical traditions, putting special emphasis on the role of "scientific music" in women's cultural engagement across class and racial boundaries (p. 15). Key to Bailey's study is the location of "women's musical practices in the performance of gentility" (p. 5). She convincingly illustrates how musical practices during this era were intricately tied to social hierarchies and distinctions, showing how different strata of society used music as cultural capital. Tracing these developments from the antebellum period to Reconstruction, she explores the effect of the dissolution of the South's social hierarchy on music making. [End Page 761] The material consulted in this study is extensive, with a focus on music read from notation in over fifteen hundred binder's volumes. Bailey also examines "numerous nineteenth-century magazines and journals, newspapers, letters and diaries, official records, and many similar documents" (p. 2). She uses these materials to assemble ethnographic readings and microhistories that collectively reveal the kaleidoscopic, multifaceted southern music-scape of the mid-nineteenth century. Bailey proceeds chronologically in five sections: Parts 1, 2, and 3 cover the antebellum period, Part 4 explores the Civil War, and Part 5 turns to Reconstruction. Each part is divided into several chapters, and each chapter offers a distinct study. Parts 1, 2, and 3 provide an in-depth exploration of the plethora of antebellum musical performers. It illustrates the ubiquity of music in society and highlights how economic growth in the 1840s and 1850s opened new avenues to gentility for the middle and poorer classes. This broadening of the sphere of gentility is evidenced by a more widespread "literate music practice" than hitherto assumed (p. 15). Part 2 focuses on prominent genres of the period and the accompanying repertory used to signify gentility, including a chapter on operatic tunes. While Parts 1 and 2 mostly provide nuance to existing studies of antebellum women's music, Part 3 reframes repertory history. It deals with the role of a genre known as scientific music in women's musical education and practice. Bailey argues that its pervasiveness was an important marker of social status. Part 4, dealing with the Civil War years, focuses on social changes and how they triggered both retroactive and progressive musical practices. In these chapters especially, Bailey shows the importance of adding music to a reading of the parlor as a space for the construction of gender, class, and ethnicity. Part 5, on women musicians in the Reconstruction era, identifies the rise of women as professional performers and the changes in repertory toward classical music. Bailey convincingly illustrates how women musicians "redefined women's sphere and influence after the war by linking domestic competence and control with a public persona" (pp. 171–72). Bailey reconfigures traditional assumptions about the musical contributions of southern women by exploring the interrelation between music making and gentility in the U.S. South. Her approach is more inclusive than seen in previous studies, charting the musical practices of white women and women of color of all social classes. The representation of Black women in her study remains sketchy by necessity. As...