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“Brilliant” Variations on Sentimental Songs: Slipping Piano Virtuosity into the Drawing Room

Montgomery, Vivian Sarah
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175530770

Abstract Details

2007, Doctor of Musical Arts, Case Western Reserve University, Musicology.
The performance of piano variations on simple popular songs was a practice embraced with great earnestness by young ladies in mid-nineteenth-century American domestic settings. Variation settings of “favorites,” in their great array of styles, techniques, and theatrical effects, served as important vehicles for defining pianistic activity of the time and played a mediating role in relation to a number of the dichotomies characterizing nineteenth-century American musical culture. This study addresses issues of cultural context, education, performance, and compositional convention related to such works, exposing their usefulness in bridging the aims of “cultivated” and “vernacular” music that appear to have polarized middle-class entertainment during this period. Beyond this function, the genre provides a valuable frame for examining the role of pianistic expertise amidst the mostly female populace of drawing room performers. Accompanying this study is a representative collection of thirty-five variation compositions based upon familiar songs of the day. The pieces span the period of 1800 to 1865, roughly outlining a time of great cultural and economic change from the post-Revolution decades into the Civil War. The works chosen also span the ranges defined by such terms as “complex” and “simple,” or “brilliant” and “easy.” This differentiation is but one of the dialectical frames, discussed in literature of the time, that show arduous effort on the part of nineteenth-century minds to assess the musical values of young America. In order to support a perception of the piano variations as sitting on the cusp of a “highbrow/lowbrow” divide, a thorough investigation of American antebellum manifestations of that divide is provided. Full examination of this tension shows the unique place of the variation genre in relation to such dualistic discourse in nineteenth-century musical life. The findings suggest that this unusual showcase for female virtuosity is a protected avenue made available to domestic pianists, in part, because of its mediating association with appealing vernacular songs, as well as its disassociation from the monumental “genius” of other more complex instrumental forms. Nineteenth-century composers and publishers alike recognized the place for such a bridge, and pursued its development with great purpose.
L. Peter Bennett (Advisor)
411 p.
Music; Women's Studies
American Antebellum piano variations; Nineteenth-century amateur keyboard music; Female pianists in early America

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Montgomery, V. S. (2007). “Brilliant” Variations on Sentimental Songs: Slipping Piano Virtuosity into the Drawing Room [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175530770

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Montgomery, Vivian. “Brilliant” Variations on Sentimental Songs: Slipping Piano Virtuosity into the Drawing Room. 2007. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175530770.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Montgomery, Vivian. "“Brilliant” Variations on Sentimental Songs: Slipping Piano Virtuosity into the Drawing Room." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175530770

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1175530770
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© 2007, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.