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David Kennerley, Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). xii + 220 pp. £47.99.
Studies of women musicians in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe have focused heavily on the conditions and discourses that placed – or sought to place – limitations on women's musical endeavours. This work has reached one broad point of consensus: while social, professional and discursive barriers were steadfastly present in women's musical lives, individual women were not always defined by them, and often escaped some of their constraints. Where women's voices and singing in particular are concerned, research on British and other European contexts has similarly discovered that women successfully contributed to musical life with great agency, despite ongoing efforts by some to limit or police how, when, and where women could do so.
In Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850, David Kennerley adds important new details to this established picture of women's music-making and the discourses in which it operated during the period, while also focusing on the voice as a particularly contested site of femininity. In some areas of his study, he gently offers new, intriguing evidence that fills out aspects of the picture that have already been explored in related literature. For example, he asserts that matters of class and nationality often had a role to play in the discourse of women's voices and music-making and in how individual women viewed their own place within it. Elsewhere, however, Kennerley is strikingly innovative in the additional frameworks that he brings to the understanding of the topic, as well as in the source material that he deftly analyses.
First, Kennerley takes religious beliefs and identities within Britain during the period as often more strongly indicative of opinions on women's music-making and singing than other factors, whether as expressed by men or by women themselves. Kennerley offers a framework in which evangelicals during the period ascribed to the notion that the body is sinful, that music in general must be treated with care so as not to be morally corrupting, and that women should remain demure in the way that they use their voices, whether in speech or, especially, in song. Yet, while this evangelical attitude may have been the one...