The European Salons
and Our Work
• Eileen Russell asked us to speak about the relationships
between our work and the European salon movement in
conjunction with our performance of “Street Scene for
the Last Mad Soprano.”
• In her usual team spirit, Eileen wanted to integrate our
work with the very interesting project her colleagues are
developing here to study Europe’s salon movement.
• Their focus is on Debussey’s settings of the “The Songs
of Bilitis” by Pierre Louÿs.
• We were happy to oblige since all of our chamber music
theater works were premiered in salon concert formats in
Europe.
Chamber Music Theater
• We describe our works as chamber music
theater.
• By this we mean works in a chamber music
format that strive to genuinely integrate music,
text, and theater.
• We also strive to use texts relevant to the
modern world and have written many of them
ourselves.
• As you perhaps saw, they are not musicals nor
operas, but a genre entirely of their own.
What is a salon?
• So the first question we need to answer is, what
is a salon?
• A salon is a social gathering of people, usually in
a private residence, to share ideas and artistic
expression.
• In their most basic form, salons were often
comprised of cultural elites meetings to amuse
and educate each other.
• In Europe, they have existed from about the
1580s to the modern day and played a central
role in both the renaissance and the Age of
Enlightenment.
The Code
• A code of behavior evolved in salons which had three
basic tenants: Egalitarianism, Politeness, and Honor (or
honesty) – these were similar to earlier codes of Italian
chivalry.
• The hostesses were most often wealthy bourgeois
women.
• The salons were not merely French.
• There were similar movements in the coffee houses of
England, and in the Tischgesellschaften in Germany.
• And of course, non-European cultures also had forms of
salon gatherings.
• Here is a painting of a salon entitled “A
reading of Molière” by Jean François de
Troy from about 1728.
• Note the large presence of women.
The Age of Enlightenment
• The salons were egalitarian: The many stratas of society
were in theory allowed to meet in equality.
• In practice, this meant that salons brought nobles and
and elite bourgeois together -- they mixed social ranks
and orders in opposition to court society.
• The salons became an institution of the Enlightenment
and served as a major channel of communication among
intellectuals.
• The Age of Enlightenment was one of the great epochs
of European history and reached its apex in the 18th
century.
• It centered around the idea that humans could be
rational and control their world through science and
knowledge
Role in Democracy
• The Age of Enlightenment also formulated
the political concepts that now define our
modern democratic societies.
• The United States, for example, was
founded during the age of enlightenment
and to this day shows both the
Enlightment’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Here is a painting entitled “A Reading in
the Salon of Mme Geoffrin” from 1755.
The Bourgeoisie
• Through salons, the bourgeoisie developed
intellectual, artistic, and moral discourse.
• By meeting for intellectual discussion, the
common people challenged the monopoly on the
intellect that up until then had been held by the
Church and State.
• This discourse was, in effect, subversive, and
became an important part of the development of
early modern forms of democracy.
• In a sense, common people also “profaned” art
by deciding for themselves what it meant and
how they would consume it.
The Enlightened Project
• It was during the Enlightenment that art also became
more common as a bourgeois commodity.
• The salons thus became cauldrons for progressive
political, intellectual and cultural thought.
• The salons also encouraged socializing between the
sexes, which at the time was also very progressive.
• In short, the salons encouraged intellectuals to engage
in the project of enlightenment.
• Here is a picture of Abbé Delille reciting his poem, La
Conversation in the salon of Madame Geoffrin in Paris in
1812.
Habermas and the
Salon Movement
• The most influential history of the salons is
Jürgen Habermas' work, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere.
• Habermas is a social historian and philosopher
who teaches at the University of Frankfurt.
• He was the first to link salons to the
development of the Enlightenment and the
evolution of democracy.
• Almost all histories written since then have been
in response to Habermas’ work.
The salons and women.
• Since most of the salons were hosted by
women, the salons have become a focus of
feminist scholarship.
• Feminist historians note how women wielded
power by controlling who was invited to
participate and through moderating discussion.
• The salon also became a way for women to
pursue a form of higher education -- they
exchanged ideas, received and gave criticism,
read their own works and heard the works and
ideas of other intellectuals.
All-Male Universities
• This was important, because it is only very
recently that women have been allowed
into many of our universities.
• Princeton and Yale, for example, only
opened their doors to women in 1969.
The Blue Stockings
• The so-called Blue Stockings became a manifestation of
this social climate that created salons.
• Bluestocking was derogatory term for an educated,
intellectual woman.
• They were stereotyped as being frumpy and the
reference to blue stockings refers to the time when
woolen worsted stockings were informal dress, as
compared with formal, fashionable black silk stockings.
• In about 1750, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu (later called “the
Queen of the Blues”) and her friends founded the first
official bluestocking society in England.
• They invited learned men to gather informally with them
to talk about books, literature, art and architecture, as
well as places and events that interested them.
Ethnic diversity
• In some cases, salons also allowed for ethnic
diversity.
• In Germany, some of the most famous
salonnières were Jewish women such as
Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and Fanny
Mendelssohn.
• Here again we forget how recent these changes
are.
• It was only after the Second World War that
many hotels in America dropped their
regulations forbidding Jewish guests.
Criticisms of feminist approach
• It has also been noted that even though women
were often the hosts of salons, they were
seldom the featured thinkers or artists.
• And their power did not extend far outside the
salons.
• Nevertheless, the salons were harbingers of the
future.
• Women are now a majority of the students in
most universities, and the number of women
professors is increasing rapidly.
• The Bluestockings are taking over.
Chopin and the salon.
• By the 19th century, the salons had become
more raffish, and often centered around painters
and writers.
• A very famous example of a salon artist was
Frédéric Chopin.
• After his Paris concert début in February 1832,
Chopin realised that his light-handed keyboard
technique was not optimal for large concert
spaces.
• Later that year he was introduced to the wealthy
Rothschild banking family, whose patronage
opened doors for him to other private salons.
New genres for the salon
• Chopin played frequently at salons, but even
more, he preferred to play in his own Parisian
apartment for small circles of friends.
• New genres of music began to develop
specifically for salons.
• Chopin, for example, took the new salon genre
of the nocturne, invented by Irish composer John
Field, to a deeper level of sophistication.
The Hotel Lambert Salon
• One of the most famous salons Chopin frequented was
regularly held at the Hôtel Lambert on the eastern tip of
the Île Saint-Louis.
• The Hotel Lambert was a politically oriented salon for
Polish exiles.
• Paris and the Hotel Lambert served as a safe harbor for
Polish emigrants and royalists during the 1830s and 40s,
who had been exiled from their country after an
unsuccessful uprising against Russia.
• The Hotel Lambert served as both a political think-tank
and as a cultural venue for Polish artists.
• Here is a painting entitled "Chopin's
Polonaise - a Ball in Hôtel Lambert in
Paris", by Teofil Kwiatkowski.
Pauline Viardot
• Pauline Viardot who lived from 1821to 1910 was another
famous Parisian salonnière.
• She was also a well-known mezzo-soprano.
• Her music salon is credited for launching the careers of
Camille Saint-Säens, Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré,
and Charles Gounod.
• All of these composers were direct precursors of
Debussy and set the stage for the Songs of Bilitis.
• Viardot is of special interest to Abbie and I, not only
because she wrote over 100 Vocal compositions and15
Instrumental works, but most importantly because she
wrote 5 works she called Salon Operas.
Haí Lulí
• Viardot also created songs based on the
Mazurkas of Chopin .
• Here is a recording of Cecilia Bartoli
singing one entitled Haí Lulí.
• It is about a woman waiting for her lover
who does not appear.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na1gMR
cWI5U
Weimar Classicism
• Turning now to Germany, the later
Enlightenment was strongly influenced by a
group known as the Weimar Classicists.
• It’s two most notable exponents were Goethe
and Schiller.
• The circle was not really neo-classical, but
actually a rich combination of both classical and
romantic impulses.
• They strongly influenced later Germans such as
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a host of
romantic composers ranging from Schumann to
Wagner.
Weimar and Society
• The Weimar circle saw a direct connection between art
and political culture.
• They formulated ideals that they hoped would create a
socio-cultural reformation through aesthetic conceptions
and values.
• In the spirit of the Enlightenment, they celebrated
organic wholeness and harmony in art.
• They hoped education via art would produce a
flourishing cultural milieu and help society to become
“whole” in the process.
• This philosophy strongly affects Germany’s cultural life to
this day.
Weimar’s relation to our work
• In some respects the Weimarians are related to the work
Abbie and I do.
• Almost all of our works have a feminist character and
study the creative identity of women in society.
• Like the Weimar Circle of Schiller and Goethe, we too,
even if on a more modest scale, are searching for new
forms of social wholeness and harmony.
• We feel this “wholeness” can be achieved through art by
advocating the equality of women.
• The relationship between art and society was always a
hallmark of the salon movement and Abbie and I follow
in that spirit.
Fanny Mendelssohn and the
Weimar Circle
• Another famous salonnière was Fanny
Mendelssohn.
• She composed 466 pieces of music.
• Her works were often played alongside her
brother's in the salons held in the family
home in Berlin.
Weimar and Composers
• The Mendelssohns, Schubert, Schuman,
Chopin, and Liszt were all influenced by the
values of the Weimar Classicists.
• The Lieder of Schubert were often performed in
German salons and reflected the the Classist’s
sense of wholeness through art.
• And like the piano music of Chopin, they
became an embodiment of a kind of art
specifically created for the salon.
Criticisms of the Salon Movement
• Critics of the salon movement suggest that they
were not part of an oppositional public sphere.
• In many respects, they were extensions of the
values represented by the court societies they
claimed to oppose.
• In fact, most salons were not really egalitarian.
• The bourgeois public sphere discriminated
against women and the lower social strata of
society.
Even today
• Even today we see that civic, professional,
cultural, and philanthropic clubs are not
accessible to many people.
• And even today, these clubs provide the
training ground and the power base of a
stratum of bourgeois men – and perhaps a
few token women.
Egalitarianism as a mask
• Another problem was that the participants of the
salons only acted as if they were social and
economic peers.
• As with many of today’s private clubs, an ethos
of egalitarianism served only as a mask for
domination.
• Equality is espoused on the condition that
certain groups can be excluded.
• As an example, the Phoenix Country Club in AZ
maintains separate dining rooms for men and
women. This segregation is a compromise to
help them circumvent discrimination laws.
Yale Club
• Yale College did not admit women until
1969, so until then the Yale Club restricted
its membership to men.
• Wives even had to enter the club through
a separate entrance, and were not allowed
to have access to much of the clubhouse.
Vienna Philharmonic
• The Vienna Philharmonic, literally refers to itself
as a Verein, which is the German word for club.
• The Philharmonic only began admitting women
in 1997 after I began writing articles about the
orchestra that generated massive amounts of
media coverage and very large international
protests.
• The Philharmonic has also traditionally excluded
visible members of racial minorities, since they
believe such individuals would destroy the
ensemble’s image of Austrian authenticity.
Ironies
• The orchestra, however, refuses to hire a
chief conductor, since they feel that would
destroy the “egalitarianism” they have as a
club -- an egalitarian all-male, all-white
club.
• In the European salon movement, such
bracketing usually worked to the
advantage of dominant groups in society
and to the disadvantage of subordinates.
Common Concerns?
• A third problem is that there was no consensus about
what defined the common concerns the salons
addressed.
• Who decides what a public issue is?
• A commonly noted example is the historic shift in how
domestic violence is viewed.
• It was once primarily a matter of private concern, but is
now generally accepted as something that affects our
communities.
• In fact, our performance tonight questions the biased
viewpoints of male dominated art.
• The Last Mad Soprano addresses a new domain of
common concern about domestic abuse as represented
in opera.
The modern salon vs.
the public institution.
• Today, the salon has all but disappeared, at least
in its traditional manifestations.
• In the middle of the 20th century, there were still
groups similar to salons in New York City’s
intellectual life.
• One example was the intellectual generalists
centered around the Partisan Review.
• These writers included luminaries such as
Edmund Wilson, Paul Goodman, Harold
Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy.
The Value of Discourse
• It has been suggested that Susan Sontag was the last
writer of that tradition.
• These generalists shared a desire to exhibit intellectual
range.
• They found a way to pay attention to specific intellectual
topics and yet comment on the larger cultural context in
which those topics appeared.
• The loss of these forms of thought created by
intellectuals in salon-like atmospheres might be
detrimental to our political, intellectual, and cultural lives.
• (The Internet.)
The Algonquin Round Table
• In a lighter vein, the Algonquin Round Table was
another form of a modern salon.
• They were a group of New York writers, critics,
actors and wits. They met for lunch each day at
the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly
1929. At these luncheons they engaged in
wisecracks, wordplay and witticisms.
• Newspaper columns by Round Table members
recorded the conversations and were
disseminated across the country.
Salons vs. the modern concert hall
• In many respects, the modern concert hall suppresses some of the
forms of intellectual discourse that were common in the salons.
• The proscenium arch creates a wall between the quasi-deified artist
and the public.
• The intimate give and take of the salon is lost.
• The movement of art toward being a commodity has created many
problems.
• On one hand, the mass media strove toward the lowest common
denominator of the masses which inevitably made much artistic
expression secondary to financial interests.
• And in counter-reaction, many modernist artists simply
disassociated themselves from the public in ways that ultimately
caused their work to become a ghettoized area only for elite
specialists.
Connecting
• The salon, by contrast, is entirely oriented
to explorations of the new in an
atmosphere that intimately connects the
artist to his or her public.
• The work of Schubert, Schumann, Chopin
and Debussy all testify to the benefits of
the salon format.
Other advantages of the salon
• The looser relationships of the salon also allow
for more freedom of expression since they are
free of many common forms of institutional
restraints.
• Salons could also help renew our appreciation
for localized cultural identity and offer an
alternative to the uniformity of the mass media.
• Salons also place artistic expression in an
atmosphere of discourse with the artists and
audience instead of merely isolated,
disempowered consumption.
Socially meaningful
• Through this kind of contact, the public gains a
genuine sense of involvement with culture.
• The salon could help re-establish the traditions
of the public intellectual.
• In this regard, salons could help reestablish a
sense of communal discourse that could
strengthen and protect democratic values in a
world where those values are threatened by
forces such as technology and globalization.
The salon and
chamber music theater
• And now I will briefly address some specifics about
salons and tonight’s program.
• Five hundred years ago, a salon-like group known as the
Florentine Camerata set the goal of genuinely integrating
words, music and theater.
• The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists,
musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance
Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count
Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the
arts, especially music and drama.
• True to the salon format, they met at the house of
Giovanni de' Bardi.
Music and Drama
• The Camerata’s apex of influence was between 1577
and 1582.
• It can thus be seen as one of the very earliest salons.
• As noted, one of their primary goals was to create a new
genre that would completely integrate music and drama.
• Unfortunately, they were not successful, and in the 500
years since, Western culture has still not solved the
thorny problem of integrating music and drama on an
equal basis.
• Instead, Western culture moved toward opera where
music is supreme, while the libretti and drama are
secondary, if not verging on the ridiculous.
Chamber Music Theater
• Western culture has also been unable to create
a successful form of chamber music theater -which was another of the Camerata’s goals.
• Some of the greatest minds in Western culture
tried to create chamber music theater but did not
succeed.
• These include Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt,
and Richard Strauss.
• They composed a genre of chamber music
theater works that were called “melodramas.”
Melodramas
• In the 19th century, melodramas were a high art
form.
• It was only later that they represented dasterdly
villians twirling mustaches in Victorian theaters.
• The musical melodramas of the Romantic era
were generally recitations of romantic poems
with coloristic piano accompaniments – though
Strauss accompanied his with an orchestra.
Melodramas
• The melodramas of Schumann and Liszt were
written at the height of the Romantic era, and
are so full of Sturm and Drang they can sound
almost humorous to us today.
• Composers also had few methods for using the
voice to speak and sing in ways that were
musical and yet able to create believable
characters.
• We will listen to a brief example by Schumann
entitled Die Fluchtlinge. The performance is by
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Attempting the impossible
• Fools that we are, Abbie and I jumped right into
the problems of genuinely integrating music and
drama, thinking we might be able to solve
problems minds like Schumann, Liszt and
Strauss couldn’t.
• After all, there is always a kind of folly in artistic
endeavor.
• And we have some advantages they didn’t have.
• With electronics we can create sonic worlds in a
chamber format that would have been
impossible for them. They relied only on the
piano for their melodramas.
Vocal techniques
and notation systems
• We also spent years studying and setting
authors like Samuel Beckett so that we could
learn to create texts that could be better
integrated with music.
• And we started from scratch, inventing and
devloping new kinds of vocal techniques and
singing suited to chamber music theater, and to
integrating music and drama.
• We also developed new ways of notating the
rhythms of spoken texts and the rhythms of
stage actions that allow the performer to be both
musical and theatrical.
A salon of our own
• And finally, in our pursuit of music and drama, we even bought a
house in Taos, NM, which is an artists colony where many
progressive artists and intellectuals live.
• Our house had a 1600 square foot wood working shop which we
renovated into a studio and theater where we can perform our works
for up to about 60 people in a salon atmosphere.
• We have a complete lighting system and high quality quadraphonic
sound system.
• The space has a great accoustic.
• We can perform our works in almost perfect detail for publics keenly
interested in what we are doing.
• We also present works by other artists.
• And Abbie’s writing club also meets there once a week to read their
latest work to each other.
Street Scene
• So now you’ve had a chance to see how far
along we have gotten trying to solve the almost
insurmountable problems of creating chamber
music theater that integrates music and drama.
• If this really were a salon, you could sit around
drinking some wine and chat with us and other
audience members about our efforts.
• But at least here, we can still have a question
and answer period if there is anyone who has
any questions.