Introduction

We are delighted to present this special issue on “New Approaches to Dickinson and Music,” a topic of growing interest in Dickinson studies. This issue grew out of a panel of the same name at the 2019 Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Asilomar, California. Yet one might say it originated two years earlier at the 2017 EDIS conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, specifically in a Dickinson Critical Institute, a seminar-like session in which much of the discussion centered on the role of music in the context of Dickinson’s life and work. The panel in Asilomar and the present issue of Women’s Studies continue and extend that conversation, and, we hope, the larger critical conversation about Dickinson and music. We are most grateful to the contributors. In addition, during the development of this issue, we were supported and encouraged by several people to whom we wish to express our sincere thanks: Renee Bergland, who chaired our panel at the Critical Institute; Martha Nell Smith, Jane Wald, and Emily Seelbinder, who offered insights into music at the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens, and helped identify archival materials; George Boziwick, who chaired our panel at the Emily Dickinson International Society conference; and Wendy Martin, who invited us to contribute our research to Women’s Studies in this special issue. We welcome interested readers to join us in exploring the interrelationship between writing and music, which is pervasive, robust, and increasingly subtle in its application, both within Dickinson studies and in literary and cultural studies more generally.

The growth in the number of journal articles, edited volume chapters, and monographs discussing Dickinson’s musical life and interests may be analogous to the turn of critical attention to Dickinson’s orthography around 1981, when Ralph Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson appeared. The manuscripts had been available to scholars within archives, and were occasionally reproduced in small numbers within variorum editions and other publications. Yet Franklin’s reproductions made visual representations of Dickinson’s sets of manuscripts widely available for the first time. While there had previously been long-standing interest in the manuscripts, Franklin’s edition prompted new inquiry during the succeeding decades into their importance in understanding her work, in monographs such as Sharon Cameron’s Choosing Not Choosing and online resources such as the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Currently, the Emily Dickinson Archive gathers, in digital form, images of nearly every publicly-available manuscript held in institutional archives.

Similarly, there has been interest in Dickinson’s musical engagement for decades. Stories about Emily Dickinson as a musician date to the earliest posthumous recollections of her friends and family. Her poems make clear her interest in music, and her letters tell stories of her musical experiences. The subject is discussed in notes by variorum editors Thomas Johnson and, later, Ralph Franklin, and Jay Leyda’s 1960 The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson and Richard Sewall’s 1974 The Life of Emily Dickinson are peppered with anecdotes that illuminate the role music played in the poet’s day-to-day life, family, and culture. Two important critical texts from the early 1990s pushed at previous understandings of Dickinson’s musical life and practices. One was Judy Jo Small’s 1990 Positive as Sound, whose first chapter comprised an extended argument about why an understanding of Dickinson’s musical sophistication should matter to our reading of her work. Small was primarily concerned with music in relation to rhyme and prosody, but she, along with Cristanne Miller, Paula Bennett, Martha Nell Smith, and other feminist critics, interwove arguments about music as a component of the liberatory uncoupling of Dickinson’s prosody from constraining forms with which the poems had previously been almost exclusively associated. Aside from Small’s work, the other important critical text was Carlton Lowenberg’s 1992 Musicians Wrestle Everywhere. Lowenberg’s book is primarily a catalog of musical settings of Dickinson’s work since her death and the posthumous publication of her poems. Yet it opens with a concise, thorough history of Dickinson’s musical experiences and practice. Lowenberg drew from earlier biographical accounts by Sewall, Leyda, and others, as well as his own original research, to make the case that music was fundamentally important to Dickinson’s life and work.

Subsequent writing about music has been largely archeological, in the spirit of Lowenberg, or has sought to complicate received narratives about the role musical principles and practices play in her work, as Small did. An exception is Carolyn Lindley Cooley’s 2003 The Music of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and Letters, still the only full-length monograph devoted to the subject. Cooley rightly points out that, to that point, writing on the subject had been relatively “scarce and scattered,” and remedies that problem (2). She concisely distills what is known about Dickinson’s understanding of music, and shows, rather than tells, how music underlies much of what makes Dickinson’s writing distinctive, as well as why her work has been so amenable to musical settings by others. Work that builds on Lowenberg, and on Cooley’s, as well, brings to light previously unknown or ignored aspects of Dickinson’s musical life and culture, or adds to the knowledge around musical settings. Victoria N. Morgan’s 2010 monograph Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture is an example of scholarship that builds on Small’s effort to challenge merely anecdotal approaches to Dickinson and music. Morgan challenges the implications of the old truism that the poems’ formal qualities rely on orthodox Congregationalist hymns. By uncovering a thriving culture of women hymnodists, and expanding readers’ understanding of the role of American hymnody, she recontextualizes any formal debt to hymn culture. A 2017 special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal with the theme “Dickinson and Celebrity,” featured several pieces that touched on music.¹ ; Christopher Phillips’ 2018 The Hymnal: A Reading History devotes its final chapter to an innovative literary-critical reading of the hymn-books in the Dickinson family library. A 2019 essay in the Emily Dickinson Journal by the present editor Gerard Holmes uncovered and examined overlooked early musical settings of Dickinson poems. Interest has also grown in exploring Dickinson’s secular musical life in relation to her writing.

These strains of critical inquiry were further galvanized when, in 2013, Harvard University’s Houghton Library scanned and published online Dickinson’s complete personal bound sheet music collection, a remarkable document rich with information about not only Dickinson the musician, but the wider set of practices surrounding music collection and performance by nineteenth-century American women.² The surprising breadth and, in some cases, complexity of the music contained within have been most thoroughly described by George Boziwick in a series of journal articles and online writings, beginning in the early 2010s, including, “My Business Is to Sing,” in the Journal of the Society for American Music, and “Emily Dickinson’s Music Book” in The Emily Dickinson Journal. We anticipate that a forthcoming monograph by Boziwick will undoubtedly offer new perspectives on all of these topics. Additionally, music appears as a subtopic in recent monographs, including the two reviewed in this issue, and Dickinson’s writings remain a reliable, and growing, source of creative musical adaptation, as they have been since 1894.

The panel “New Approaches to Dickinson and Music,” which took place at the August 8–11, 2019 Emily Dickinson International Society conference, featured lectures by two of the contributors (Wendy Tronrud and Emma Duncan) and one of the editors (Samantha Landau) of this special issue. This panel sought to add to the growing conversation surrounding how Dickinson, her family and friends engaged with music, and by extension, how their engagement fits into the broader quilt of American music that wove together influences from religious, popular, and classical tunes. The panel was chaired by Boziwick, whose work on Dickinson and music (as mentioned above) has been vital to the development of this field. Wendy Tronrud’s presentation on Dickinson and birds traced the surprising connections between Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, folk and black song from the antebellum and Civil War periods, and fossils of bird-tracks discovered in the Connecticut River Valley. Emma Duncan presented work on Dickinson’s examination of Christian belief and doubt through references and imagery related to hymn and prayer in her poetry. Duncan claimed that Dickinson uses poetry as a mode of both introspection and criticism. Finally, Samantha Landau, one of the editors of this special issue, presented part of her research gathered from the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Archive at Brown University, which supports the theories that Dickinson and her sister-in-law Susan used music as form of communication between themselves and the society with which they engaged, and that both women contributed to the musical education of Susan’s daughter, Martha. The reaction to the panel was overwhelmingly positive, with a Q&A session that extended longer than the planned session, and audience members lingering afterward for deeper discussions with the panelists. Tronrud’s paper encouraged lively questions about the use of minstrelsy song at the Homestead. In particular, the issue of race and its relationship with music during the 19th century was raised as a subject deserving of more attention in Dickinson Studies. Duncan’s paper elicited questions about spirituality during Dickinson’s time, especially Dickinson’s use of prayer. It was suggested that Emma also examine the connection between prayer and hymn, which she has pursued in the published version of her essay included here. Landau’s presentation brought up salient points about the lack of recent research into Dickinson’s relationship with her niece, especially regarding their shared musical background. Dickinson’s use of musical imagery in conversation with Susan was also pointed out as important. Somewhat controversially, Landau’s presentation included a supposition that some of the sheet music might contain Dickinson’s handwriting in addition to Susan’s and Martha’s; scholars in the audience offered their opinions, many voicing conservative views that the writing belongs only to Susan and Martha, and not to Dickinson.

Building upon these lectures, our issue’s topic “New Approaches to Dickinson and Music” aims to contribute to and advance these themes, while also suggesting new directions and ways of thinking about them. We are excited by the way these essays build upon the foundation of the conference panel, finding new valences as their authors dug more deeply into their subjects. A fourth essay, by co-editor Gerard Holmes, offers another way of approaching the subject. Finally, we have been fortunate to find, in the interim, that a pair of monographs relevant to the issue’s theme had been issued, as well as a CD of new musical settings of Dickinson’s poems, letters, and even the poet’s now-famous recipe for black cake. Taken together, the writings collected here point to new questions, consider resources that have been neglected or have not been considered in relation to music, and in so doing apply new methodologies to the topic of Dickinson and music. As with orthography (or visual art, gardening, fashion and clothing production, or celebrity, to name just a few topics that have formed the basis of Dickinson-focused monographs, edited volumes, and journal issues), there are many ways to think about music in relation to Dickinson, beyond documenting instances of music performance, considering their rhythmic interrelationships, and relitigating arguments over hymnal form.

Wendy Tronrud’s essay, “The Fossil Bird-Tracks”: Emily Dickinson Performing Archeologically” begins with a seemingly throwaway remark by Dickinson’s early editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, comparing her handwriting to “the famous fossil bird-tracks” in Amherst College’s natural history museum. Higginson’s focus on the visual qualities of Dickinson’s poems anticipates scholarship of recent decades that focuses on Dickinson’s orthography. Yet Tronrud extends this conversation by asking what sounds were made by the birds whose motions left those tracks. This is Tronrud’s entry point to a wide-ranging exploration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “language is fossil poetry.” She seeks and unearths a variety of “strange meanings” (the phrase is nineteenth-century geologist Hugh Miller’s) not only in Dickinson’s orthography but in Walt Whitman’s use of slang, and in representations by Higginson and other white abolitionists of African American music in the immediate postwar era, and in its hideous parody, blackface minstrelsy. Higginson’s editing of Dickinson’s poems, like the work of geologists like Miller, involved unearthing, presenting, and crucially, interpreting, telling stories about artifacts, Tronrud ultimately suggests. Higginson the would-be fin de siècle archaeologist/ethnographer treats the poems as clues from which he claims to reconstitute for his readers the sights and sounds of a by-then-fossilized antebellum culture of parlors, pianos, and poetry. This, like all attempts to reconstruct the meanings of the past, involves a creative act on the part of the geologist, ethnographer, editor, or literary critic, who compresses time, grafting present understandings onto evidence of the past, in order to claim the authority to speak on behalf of its long-dead creators.

Samantha Landau’s essay, “‘Invisible, as music – ’: Sheet Music and Communication in the Dickinson Family” examines findings from Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s archive at Brown University John Hay Library and the ways in which this archive’s contents demonstrates how Bianchi (and by extension, Susan Gilbert Dickinson) carried forward Dickinson’s musicianship and musicality. Landau found the archive at Brown largely unexamined and in a state of disorganization, such that unbound sheet music from various members of the Dickinson family as well as their friends (and possibly others, too) were mixed together in an extensive collection composed of several very heavy boxes. At this point it is difficult to precisely state the importance of this archive’s contents, but to be sure it tells the story of Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s vast musical talents and deep connections with the professional musical world. It also buttresses Bianchi’s assertions about Dickinson’s engagement with Bianchi’s early musical training made in Bianchi’s memoirs and hints at a very vibrant engagement with music in the Homestead and the Evergreens in general.

Emma Duncan’s “Defamiliarizing Faith: Emily Dickinson’s use of Hymns, Scripture, and Metaphor” begins by thinking about the connection between Dickinson’s writing and nineteenth-century hymns, but does so in a nuanced, complex, and surprising way. Dickinson, Duncan argues, actively destabilizes hymnal themes and forms, not necessarily because she is a religious skeptic, but as a way of prompting deeper inquiry, both religious and humanistic. Her use of doubt in her poems is an unconventional method of exploring spirituality that she shared with her friends and family in a collective, yet still private, experience. Furthermore, because Dickinson’s poems are sometimes referred to as hymns or prayers, Duncan asserts that Dickinson treats poetry as another way to engage with the Divine. Duncan contextualizes Dickinson’s approach to spirituality against the backdrop of the Christian revivals of her time, explores the hymnals that she used and their significance to her poetry, and explains how, for Dickinson, these two influences help her create a Christian language that was uniquely her own, strongly influenced by musical rhythms and sounds.

Gerard Holmes, in “‘the Bird/Who sings the same, unheard,/As unto Crowd – ’: Dickinson, Improvised Performance, and the Business of Birdsong,” considers a familiar topic, birds and their songs in Dickinson’s writing. Yet he argues that, for Dickinson, birdsong serves a purpose atypical for nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. Rather than the prototypically poetic larks and nightingales of Romantic and Sentimental poetry, Dickinson’s birds are typically common, low-flying, close-to-home species, often visually unremarkable but with distinctive songs. Their songs associate them with familiar personas and, often, with workers of various kinds: the sharp-voiced blue jay is a brigadier (Fr1596), while the robin’s simple, familiar song denotes a farmer (Fr1520) and the bobolink’s complex, striking one marks him as a chorister (Fr236). Together, Dickinson’s birds comprise a kind of economic community, something like the village of Amherst. In this way, Dickinson’s writing about birds shows her awareness of business. Commonly treated, in the critical literature, as a child of privilege, whose family’s wealth enabled her to stand apart from the messy world of commerce. Holmes reads Dickinson’s bird poems alongside a pair of letters written during the pivotal early years of her writing career, that discuss both birds and business. Together, these show Dickinson articulating a distinctive stance toward the business of writing. Just as her birds exist in communities self-created through song, Dickinson created a circle of writers through her correspondence, which allowed her to share her poems on her own terms, outside commercial distribution systems, setting the terms for their distribution with her male, professional correspondents.

The issue also contains three reviews of recent large-scale works touching on Dickinson’s musical life, culture, and legacy. Zoë Pollak reviews Sandra Runzo’s 2019 “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture, reading Runzo’s monograph as part of a larger “recalibration” of critical and popular understanding of Dickinson away from the sad spinster poetess, to one more actively engaged with the cultural, including musical, currents of her time. Cate L. Mahoney sees Martha Ackmann’s 2020 These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson doing similar work, presenting Dickinson, as much as is possible for a historical figure in the present tense, by focusing on just a few illustrative episodes in the poet’s life, distilled, “constructed delicately and exceptionally researched.” Finally, Maja Brlečić reviews a 2019 CD, Emergence: Emily Dickinson, by lyric soprano Nadine Benjamin and Dickinson scholar/pianist Nicole Panizza. Brlečić, herself a pianist and instructor of piano, as well as a Dickinson scholar, writes that their thoughtful and heartfelt interpretations of both familiar and new musical settings of Dickinson’s poems, letters, and, yes, a cake recipe, help us to strikingly feel Dickinson the pianist/poet’s presence across the centuries.

It is difficult to overstate how integral music was to everyday life during Dickinson’s lifetime. It is impossible to document the full range of her musical experiences. Dickinson was not a recluse, but she was a private person. Leaving aside the certainty that only a fraction of her writings have survived and made their way into archives, much of what we experience doesn’t get written down, even today. Think of the music one listens to while making dinner in the evening, the songs one sings along with while driving in the car, or the orchestration in the background of the movies we watch. At the beach from underneath a neighboring umbrella, through the walls from an annoying neighbor’s apartment, and even at the drugstore: we may not seek out the music we hear in such places, and perhaps we do not highly esteem or even like these sounds. Yet these are part of our soundscape, much as, on any given day, Dickinson may have heard a circus band practicing at a distance; a pianist playing for an Amherst College gymnastics class; bells calling factory workers or Sunday worshippers to their respective buildings; the discordance of her young niece Martha’s piano practice sessions next door; a drunken neighbor wandering home singing sentimental songs in the darkness; or the first spring song of the returning bobolink. Dickinson’s response to the hymns of the Congregationalist Church, or to Jenny Lind, remain interesting and worthy subjects of critical discourse, and both are discussed in this issue. Yet, we can widen our focus. Inspired by models such as Judith Farr’s The Passion of Emily Dickinson and Daneen Wardrop’s Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing, we can extrapolate from what we know about Dickinson to place her experience – including her likely experience, given where and how she moved through Amherst, Boston, Washington, DC, and other places – to better understand the role that music played in her life and work. Sandra Runzo’s monograph, reviewed here, does some of this work, and helps to point Dickinson criticism in this direction.

It is not going too far to say that Dickinson was as much a musician as she was a poet, at least while she was physically capable of playing. As with poetry, she drew from her material culture, reading music, reading about music in the books, magazines, and newspapers that passed through the Dickinson household. George Boziwick’s analyses of Dickinson’s bound collection of sheet music offers a starting point. Yet music itself, of course, is not material, but a transient and fugitive experience. Perhaps, as with our understanding of Dickinson’s other transient activities, unlikely to generate many material objects that typically find their way into archives, like cookery, clothing, or gardening, we would be wise to use the surviving material remains, together with instruction manuals and other context-setting materials, as a jumping-off point to better understand what it was like to experience Dickinson’s soundscape and her contributions to that soundscape.³

In any case, it is clear from the poems, letters, and recollections of family and friends that music was central to Dickinson’s life and work. Much as critics of the 1980s and onward have read the letters as essentially creative acts equivalent to the poems, and evidence that Dickinson the writer blurred the generic boundaries between letter and poem, we might read Dickinson’s poems and letter-poems as essentially musical utterances, partaking of musical practices broadly understood. Doing so may help us better understand not only Dickinson but her time and artistic milieu. Is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a musical utterance? Is Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Byron’s Don Juan? Per Dickinson’s contemporary Walter Pater, all art aspires to the condition of music, but poetry shares many fundamental characteristics with music, starting with verse structure, rhythm, pace, and, when spoken aloud, pitch.

It is time to consider, in relation to Dickinson and the poets of her time, how self-consciously adventurous music was in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Richard Wagner was born seventeen years before Dickinson. Margaret Fuller met Fredric Chopin in Paris. Both Higginson and Charlotte Forten, later Grimké, introduced the songs of the formerly enslaved they encountered in Civil War South Carolina to northern readers in 1863 Atlantic essays. Imagine how revolutionary these essays would have been for readers who associated African American song with minstrelsy or with the shallow, clichéd, or hostile representations of Black song in antebellum popular culture. Music was no more static in nineteenth-century America than it is now, and Boston, Worcester, and Springfield were considered sufficiently interested in new music that both Lind and Rubinstein visited all three cities on their tours. Boston, alongside New York and New Orleans, was among the leading cities in the nation to experience new, adventurous music. The economics of music touring, especially in the postbellum era, was such that a touring musician visiting Boston or Hartford had every reason to pass through Western Massachusetts, as well. Further, Boston is also the site of the founding of the oldest independent music conservatory in America, the New England Conservatory. It was a flourishing center for the foundations of new classical music in the U.S. throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s that gave birth to the New England School of music, and it is not going too far to say that the Boston music scene helped establish formal music education as an academic study in the U.S.

In the future, then, the study of Dickinson and music may expand in several ways. From a historical and cultural studies perspective, it would be useful to continue interrogating the ways in which women in Dickinson’s community, as well as the Dickinson family, interacted using music. This would include further inquiries into how music figured in the lives of Susan and Austin Dickinson, their children, and life at the Evergreens, as well as continuing to expand our knowledge of Emily Dickinson and music at the Homestead. From a literary perspective, considering musical imagery in Dickinson’s poetry beyond hymn, verse, rhyme, and meter would also be vital to our understanding of how Dickinson used musical terms and sound for symbolic meaning. Furthermore, exploring interdisciplinary approaches to this topic, via performance, musicology, science, and other fields, would broaden the ways in which Dickinson scholarship views music and bring scholarship more in affinity with how Dickinson herself probably thought of music: defined by sound but ineffable by nature.

Notes

¹ Volume 26, Number 2, 2017.

² Dickinson’s music book is available to view and download in.pdf format at https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/archival_objects/1787295. A forthcoming monograph by the esteemed musicologist George Boziwick, whose essays on the subject are discussed below, will appropriately situate the music book within a vibrant ethnomusicological discourse that includes, recently, Mark Slobin et al., Emily’s Songbook and Petra Meyer-Frazier, Bound Music, Unbound Women.

³ There has not yet been a monograph devoted to Dickinson and food, though like music it has been a topic of great interest to both scholars and public readers. On Dickinson and clothing, see Daneen Wardrop’s Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing. On Dickinson and gardening, see Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Farr was also among the contributors to a high-quality scholarly facsimile of Dickinson’s herbarium. A similar project would be welcome for Dickinson’s bound sheet music volume, the subject of Boziwick’s forthcoming monograph, given its many interesting visual details and often-faint penciled markings.