Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: A Comprehensive Reference

6. Women in the Musical Life of the City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

121 6 Women in the Musical Life of the City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries W omen have always played an important role in the musical life of New Orleans, so much so that to write a separate chapter on women in the music of New Orleans seems almost superfluous or redundant. Yet there is a sexual bias towards men both in the sources of nineteenth-century music history and in the general conception of gender roles in the commercial world of music. If women instrumental performers, for example , perform like men, it is an uncanny feat that becomes the focus of attention , and the implication is that women are supposed to perform like women (less vigorously) and that that is their place. It is men alone who were pictured as engaged in the commerce of music. These are, of course, false images, and musical activities beyond the home were indeed often performed by women in New Orleans, even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And some women, of course, achieved an excellence that merits their inclusion in any history of the musical life of the city. Therefore, in addition to pointing out some of the general roles of women in music, it may be useful to highlight the careers of some of the most interesting women in the history of the music of the city. From the beginning of European settlement, the role of music was highlighted in the education of women. One of the first notable achievements of the women of New Orleans in the field of music was the creation, in 1727, of the oldest school of music in America still to exist.1 In that year a small group of Ursuline nuns came to New Orleans and founded a convent school for the education of the young girls now beginning to populate the new colony. Singing hymns and moralistic songs was part of the curriculum. In 1754 the nuns received a gift of a songbook that provided 294 such songs, giving us an ear into the music sung at the convent school. Entitled Nouvelles Poésies Spirituelles et Morales sur les plus Beaux Airs de la Musique Français et Italienne avec la Bas, it was originally copied by someone with the initials “C.D.” in 1736, and it is 122 | Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans drawn from a larger choir book printed in France in 1737.2 The songs are by various composers famous in Italy and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including André Campra, François Couperin, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, Henry Desmarest, Michel Lambert, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marin Marais, and Louis Marchand. The songs range from easy to moderately difficult, and there are some ornaments , typical of French song of the first half of the eighteenth century, to challenge the vocally more dexterous. Each song is accompanied by a basso continuo. Many are strophic, some with strophic variations. The hauntingly beautiful “La Solitude” by Marin Marais, for example, uses a short ostinato bass over which a soloist (teacher) presents simple, varied phrases, each echoed by a group (students); this is ideal for the beginners. On the other hand, Henry Desmarest ’s “Grandeur de Dieu” and “Sa Puissance, Sa Bonté” are short dramatic songs with wide ranges, leaps, and ornaments that would be more suitable for intermediate students. All the songs are attractive and would have inspired the young women not only to endorse the morality preached in the text but also to continue to sing them for aesthetic enjoyment for the rest of their lives. Other Catholic schools for women, in the nineteenth century, followed the pattern of the Ursuline School.3 One of them, Curto’s school for orphan young girls, has been discussed elsewhere in this book. This means that the vast majority of women in New Orleans during the nineteenth century—a city where the Catholic religion was dominant—were musically literate and trained to appreciate the great art music that they themselves perpetuated. This music was brought from the church into the home and into everyday life. And it affected not just Catholics. The stereotypical image of the wealthy white or mulatto woman who runs the household on the plantations in and around New Orleans in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century is not entirely unfounded. Such women had a lot to do with the managing of the household, education of the children, and entertainment for family and friends. Many of...