Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Anja Bunzel and Natasha Loges (review)

As cultural institutions, artistic gathering places, and creative centers, salons have long held the attention of scholars. But because salons were often seen as social affairs, their details were rarely recorded meticulously. The resulting paucity of data makes them difficult to study, and exploring musical practices within these spaces is particularly challenging. Exact playlists were rarely named or left behind, so understanding a salon's soundscape actually means understanding the social and cultural spaces the salon occupied. But who were the international and interdisciplinary groups of guests regularly in attendance, and what assortment of ideas and agendas circulated within them? In this volume of essays, musicologists and coeditors Anja Bunzel and Natasha Loges offer a window into this rich cultural scene as well as new tools for facilitating the study of its music. Many of the book's contributors participated in an international bilingual conference, "The European Salon: Nineteenth-Century Salonmusik," held at Maynooth University (Maynooth Ireland) in October 2015. Each of their sixteen chapters represents a thread in a larger scholarly conversation, and together they bring into focus both the homogeneity and heterogeneity of the salon as an institution as well as several different iterations of salon music itself.

Bunzel and Loges set out to accomplish these aims from the start. Each chapter informs the others, and collectively the essays provide a rich, nuanced, and comprehensive understanding of the salon as both an individual initiative and a collective enterprise. Sometimes these connections are explicitly drawn (as in Bunzel's call to Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger's essay in chapter 1) as well as inferred (as illustrated throughout the whole of the opening section). The volume includes a selection of salons across time and place, including locations in France, Germany, Sweden, England, and the United States, from ca. 1800 to ca. 1950. "Salon research today takes many forms and perspectives," note Bunzel and Loges in the introduction. "Not only are genre and style discussed and reconsidered here from a musicological standpoint, but other far-reaching considerations continually enrich research; organology including technology and recording practice, recollection studies, cultural studies, media studies and critical historiography bear witness to the historical and socio-cultural potential salon research still has to offer" (p. 10). Each chapter subsequently considers a unique set of evidence as a lens onto these actors. The volume is divided into three sections of varying perspectives: the opening section, "Concepts and Contexts," considers how we look at the salon; part 2, "Representations of the Salon," concerns how the salon was seen in the past; and part 3 comprises six case studies.

Part 1 represents well how the book's chapters are in dialogue with one another. Underpinning the entire section are the interconnected networks between Johanna Kinkel, Bettina von Arnim, Joseph Joachim, and Johannes Brahms. Looking at artifacts ranging from detailed journal entries to fragmentary sketches, all four essays consider a different point of entry into the discussion; the extant source material is as similar and diverse as the salons themselves. For example, in chapter 1, Bunzel provides some biographical information about the composer, piano pedagogue, and writer Johanna Kinkel before delving into performances of her works and the social circles in which she dwelled. But, as Bunzel points out, primary source material is often problematic for its lack of detail, self-serving nature, or inflated portrayal of the experience. She "will consider this aspect . . . by uncovering and commenting on omissions and misrepresentations in Kinkel's own and her contemporaries' writings" (p. 15). By turning the lens to the absence of information, Bunzel allows us to question the greater musical narrative and reconsider nineteenth-century historiography.

Similarly, in chapter 2, Jennifer Ronyak explores Bettina von Arnim's unfinished lied sketches—specifically, a melodic outline of Johann Wolgang von Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied II." Ronyak's reading of what she identifies as...