Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance (review)

The place of women in eighteenth-century music-making has generally been relegated in modern scholarship to that of domestic performer or, in the realm of professional music, to ardent fan or patron. Leslie Ritchie seeks to overturn this long-held conviction, in part by expanding the definition of “women writing music.” She lays out the five tenets underlying her argument in the introduction: first, the assumed connection between social harmony and music harmony was not absolute (4–11); second, performance was part of the creative process; third, public and private performances were less differentiated than previously thought (“to speak radically, there is no such thing as private music” [19]); fourth, “derogatory assumptions . . . underlie the modern distinction between art songs and popular songs,” which existed on a continuum (21); and fifth, eighteenth-century music-making was “profoundly multidisciplinary” (24). Then limiting her discussion to vocal music, Ritchie includes not only composers but authors of song texts and singers as part of the process of writing music.

Ritchie rebuts the belief that women who participated in making music shied away from public notice and desired anonymity. Her examination of the list of compositions registered at Stationers’ Hall during the eighteenth century shows that of the composers only 8 percent were women, but of these, 73 percent identified themselves by name, “rather than as ‘A Lady’ or ‘A Woman of Quality’ or a similar denomination” (72). Indeed, the desire for recognition and a kind of copyright led some women (and men) to claim registration without having actually done so. Further, the importance of the role of women in the creation of music can be seen in the statistic that 42 percent of the performers named on registered musical compositions were women.

Ritchie also seeks to complicate the notion that music harmony and social harmony were synonymous. Although she acknowledges the place of music in the lives of many eighteenth-century women, especially as described by their male contemporaries, as a useful discipline, a reinforcement (through text) of social mores, and an important part of courtship ritual, she argues that “women’s pleasure in music can be understood as both subservient to and, sometimes, subversive of moral discipline and the social purposes that musical practice was thought to serve” (31). She divides women’s song repertoire into three “dominant categories” of charity (Caritas), pastoral (Arcadia), and politics/nation (Britannia), and discusses specific examples that demonstrate “the ways in which women strategically exploited these categories’ boundaries” (28).

There is a great deal of value in Ritchie’s evidence and argument. As a musicologist working with both musical and literary materials, I know the pitfalls of a multidisciplinary undertaking, and Ritchie handles the terrain with some panache. She certainly does not slight the music: her book is rich with musical example and facsimile, and she doesn’t shy away from musical analysis. In fact, I wonder what readers will think of the sentence: “Harmonically, the tune is set in D major, and uses various inversions of the chords of D major, b minor, G major and A major (as well as an E major chord that functions as an applied dominant for A major) in its simple accompaniment” (122–3). Unfortunately, Ritchie does not provide the music for this example. I can only assume that difficulties in acquiring the necessary permissions led to the situation whereby some of the most detailed analyses are not accompanied by examples, but simpler songs given less detailed discussions are provided in full (e.g., the modified strophic song, “Crazy Jane” [112–5]).

There are more serious problems, however. The conclusions drawn by Ritchie are too often unwarranted from the evidence she provides. She claims that James Grassineau in his Musical Dictionary of 1740 defines “harmony” with a set of binary opposites (“one / many; pleasing / codified; natural / scientific” [4]), which simply are not there. Similarly, she draws from Grassineau’s definition of “testo...