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The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (review)

One of the staples of Western literary and pictorial imagery from the last four and a half centuries has been the young woman seated at a keyboard instrument in a domestic interior, either alone or with one or more intimate companions. Belonging neither to the pure heavens of St Cecilia nor to the wild elements of the sirens, she inhabits the human realm between the two, although her name as ‘Celia’ or ‘Serena’ may suggest proximity to one or other in spite of her containment within four walls. Iconic male musicians from an even longer temporal span also tend to hover between the divine inspiration of King David or angel performers and the infernal realm of multidemonic cacophony or a single diabolical fiddler. But, like the highly mobile Orpheus, they are rarely contained by any one space, especially any domicile they may share with women and children. And no single instrument is particularly associated at any time or place with fictions of human male performance. Regula Hohl Trillini’s book is the first study to investigate literary images of all sorts of domestic practice in a single nation over an appreciable time-span, in this case England from the Tudor era to the Great War. Because of the nature of the evidence, this work is dominated by young women at the keyboard. However, they are contextualized by singing and harp-playing sisters and rivals, and by men who not only listen with rapt attention, but also play a wide variety of instruments including pianos and the like. The Gaze of the Listener is an extremely thorough and deeply learned survey of three and a half centuries of English poems, plays, stories, novels, and related conduct literature that demonstrates the highly gendered history of domestic performance from the acceptance of the pluckedor hammered-string keyboard instrument as a physical presence in the home to the dawn of an era of mechanically reproduced music as a source of domestic entertainment. The author has not just read widely and impressively among her primary materials, but thoroughly incorporates a wide range of modern scholarship from the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault to that of Richard Leppert and Ruth Solie. The title of the book refers to the constant that, for authors from the era of William Shakespeare through to that of Virginia Woolf, the sound of household musicmaking is relatively unimportant. Instead, it is the visual image of the musician that is most vital to literary writers, and even more so to the characters who witness and are moved by the performances described. By the midVictorian era, there is even a physical type associated with the domestic musician in mainstream fiction, whether hero or villain in any given narrative: a diminutive and very feminine young woman of flawless AngloSaxon fairness with softly curling hair. Her stereotypical male analogue is, by greatest contrast, a dusky foreigner or a charmingly immature native. In both cases, even the expectation of musicality arises from key elements of visual description. And only the woman fits the era’s gendered social norms concerning music in the home, for which, even in fiction, a man’s proper contribution was to look and listen or possibly, as an excuse for closer physical proximity to the lovely performer, to serve as a page-turner. Beyond the constant of domestic music as visual activity and enhancement of female heterosexual desirability, Trillini emphasizes the differences between the literary expectations for the art in each successive era. To do so, she has read and contextualized an impressive range of poems, plays, novels, short stories, and the conduct manuals known to their readers and writers, including many from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have been overlooked by previous scholars. For the Tudor would-be courtier, in an era in which musical criticism was far more concerned with social and moral effects than with any sort of aesthetic quality, performance by voice or on appropriate instruments was a pleasant pastime that was not to interfere with his duties to state or to family, nor even to suggest their neglect by a professional-level expertise. Although the first two Tudor monarchs provided training on lute and keyboards to their daughters as well as their sons, conduct writers became increasingly adamant that gentlewomen’s music was to be a simple ornament to them, and gentlemen’s music was