Post 2 for this week!

Our second class this week focused on the place of chamber music in Victorian England. I like the topic of chamber music in any context, so I was kind of excited about this one, but admittedly, the articles we read for this became a little dry to me. I started with the Bashford first, and it just had me confused for a while. It started out by talking about the origins of musicology. It focused on what musicology studied and who studied it, and then it stated for several pages the fact that no one writes enough about Victorian music. After such an opening, I thought that Bashford was going to finally write the definitive work about Victorian music that she said was missing from history, but then it just seemed to go on talking about the reasons that there is not enough research over Victorian era music. At this point, I thought that we were not really trying to solve the problem at hand, just excusing it, and I wondered why anyone would want to write an article all about excuses for not writing the article they really want out of life. After getting so far in (amidst 71 pages), I finally realized that it was tying together backwards for me. All of the examples were about chamber music, and the point of the paper was finally making sense. It was proving that the Victorians played chamber music despite lack of evidence. The opening of the paper had led me in the wrong direction. Reading the Temperley article helped to clear it up even further. The journal entries, estate records, and records from publishers and sellers were all compelling evidence showing that performing in small chamber groups was actually quite common as a leisure activity for them. I don't know why it was secretive and somewhat shameful to the Victorian men. I don't know how they saw it as effeminate when they hardly let women play the same instruments as they used. Still, it seems like men playing music together back then would be like men getting together today to paint each others toenails. It's absurd to me, but they had their own views on musicians back then.