Music and Image

This innovative book examines the place and practice of musical life in eighteenth-century England among the upper classes. Focusing on the home, it shows how domestic music-making was shaped by socio-cultural forces while itself contributing to socio-cultural formation. Particular attention is given to visual representations of music in eighteenth-century paintings, drawings and prints. Other documentary material analyzed includes the music of the period, instruction manuals, tracts on education, courtesy and conduct books, sermons, diaries, letters and memoirs, fictional writing and journalism. Through these media the author examines the role played by construction, the human body via questions of physicality and sexuality in dancing, its agency in defining and replicating dominant ideologies of the family and its use in establishing and maintaining social and cultural boundaries.