Emily Dickinson’s Music Book: A Performative Exploration

Emily Dickinson’s Music Book (EDR 469), part of the Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, opens a significant window into mid-nineteenth-century music-making. More importantly, it gives us a unique view through a musical lens of the poet’s activities and the music with which she was intimately familiar. A selective survey of the content of Dickinson’s “binders’ volume” of published sheet music, along with an examination of relevant correspondence, illuminates just how assiduously Dickinson collected sheet music and how fully she participated in music-making activities. This article offers a musicological perspective on Dickinson’s musical agency and explains how her music book afforded her a wellspring for sharing and conveying information about her daily musical activities, enlivening her correspondence, animating her relationships with family, friends, and the Dickinson household servants, eventually finding an outlet in her emerging poetic voice. Aiding in this transition is the “heavenly music” she was known to have improvised at the keyboard, which may also have found its genesis in her music book and provided her with a palpable and cognizant impetus for an inner musical life that realized its poetic fulfillment in the cascade of verse she produced in the early 1860s.