Julia’s Gift: The Social Life of Scores, c.1830

Abstract

This article addresses a subject long overlooked by students and scholarship — the musical annual. Emerging in London in 1829, this was an enormously popular brand of commercial publication conventionally produced for holiday sales. One particular copy — given as a present to an 11-year-old girl that year — proves a useful starting point from which to interrogate these items as a whole. Several avenues of inquiry suggest themselves: ideas of gift exchange and commerce, histories of the role such music played in adolescent upbringing and pianism, accounts of period notions of ‘the fair sex’, and considerations of the relation between authenticity and deception in annual poetics. In the end, the author attempts to recuperate some enigma or aura for the musical score — not by appealing to some allusive or metaphysical ‘work-content’ immanent in the text, but by exploring the sense in which these volumes were and are souvenirs — perhaps remote from traditional intellectual concerns, but redolent of a bygone and elusive ‘social life’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Davies

James Davies ([email protected]) is a Research Fellow in Music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.