“Invisible, as Music – ”: Sheet Music and Communication in the Dickinson Family

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Notes

¹ The Evergreens is the name of house that Dickinson’s brother, Austin, had built after his marriage to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. It is located close to the Dickinson Homestead; there is a small path that goes between the houses, which occupants used for frequent visits. For more on the provenance of The Evergreens and its ownership, see Barton St. Levi Armand, “The Keeper of the Keys: Mary Hampson, the Evergreens, and the Art Within.” See also Christopher Benfey, “‘Best Grief Is Tongueless’: Jerome Liebling’s Spirit Photographs.”

² Aunt Lavinia is not to be confused with Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia. Aunt Lavinia wrote Edward Dickinson, Emily’s father: “She has learned to play on the piano – she calls it moosic” (qtd. in Sewall 324). Her time at her aunt’s house, loving and calm in comparison to the prosaic Dickinson household, provided the perfect situation for her to see music as a sanctuary. Before the age of 3, it seems Emily had learned some piano, though it is unclear whether these were just a willful and childish plucking of the keys.

³ Although Dickinson wrote to her friend less frequently after leaving Mount Holyoke Seminary, she continued to play piano for friends and family at home well into the 1850s.

⁴ Square pianos were immensely popular for making music in domestic settings from the 18^th century until the late 1880s; they reached peak popularity in the U.S. as European technology was improved upon. Square pianos were replaced by the better-sounding and much improved technology of upright and grand pianos after the 1880s. For examples of square pianos and information about their history, see Michael Cole, square piano restorer and builder’s website: squarepianos.com/square.html

⁵ According to Harvard’s Houghton Library, the piano was manufactured between 1845 and 1851 by Hallet, Davis & Co. out of Boston. Houghton has a listing of the Dickinson family artifacts that includes this piano, but unfortunately no photographs feature the immense attention to detail present on the piano itself. It is a work of art in addition to being an instrument.

⁶ This sort of communication may be read as a bucking of gender norms. While men’s musical education usually focused on the theoretical, women’s musical education was practical, aimed at bequeathing the female music student with “accomplishments” that would advance her socially rather than professionally or emotionally. Indeed, the emotional aspects of music learning were seen as dangerous; passivity and solemnity in performance were expected. For a general discussion of gender and sound production, see Leppert 67–70; for a discussion on gender and sexual expectations with regard to music performance and learning, see Leppert 153–160.

⁷ In return, Emily made him wristlets, which his daughter fondly remembered in the 1950s (L137).

⁸ In addition, their friendship seems to have been one of mutual understanding – John not only comprehended her morbidity and her musical talent, he felt that her community did not truly appreciate her (405). When John visited, Sewall claims that the pieces she played were of her own composition (407). This is one of several episodes that hints at Emily’s music being as private a gift as her poetry, shared only with close and trusted friends. Yet after John’s graduation and his appointment to a school in New Hampshire, little is known about what, if any, friendship they maintained.

⁹ Smith and Hart date this poem to the period after Susan and Austin moved to the Evergreens, and points out that the fascicle version of it “was entirely inked over” as if someone, perhaps Mabel Todd, did not want anyone to read it. See 76–77.

¹⁰ Charles R. Anderson and Judy Jo Small both point out that the word “glee” in Dickinson’s poems sometimes functions as a double entendre, meaning both happy energy and a chorus. Glee clubs were (and are) a popular form of chorus, often formed at colleges and schools. See Anderson 23; Small 35.

¹¹ For some examples of the songs that the lessons included, see, Small n. 14, 227.

¹² Mason, in particular, would have been influential to this knowledge of music; his career focused on disseminating his ideas about music (especially religious music), working with professionals and amateurs, and creating opportunities for vocal music and general music education. See Wienandt vii.

¹³ For more about poets’ usage of music and music’s usage of poetry, see Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. Kramer considers romantic poetry’s musical connections, and 19^th century music’s poetic basis. For information specifically on Whitman and music, see Kramer 223–26. Kramer claims that Whitman “attempt[s] to dissolve the boundaries between poetry and music by linking the two arts to a psychological rhythm” (223). He further asserts that the poet uses his “imagination to transform any natural sound into music” (224). This closely parallels what Dickinson does in her letters to Susan, uniting and conflating the buzz-hum of nature with instruments and singing.

¹⁴ It has also been often repeated that Mabel Todd played piano for Dickinson late in Dickinson’s life, and that Emily listened from the stairs. See, for example, Benjamin Lease 31; Cooley 9–10; Sewall 218. Cooley claims that Dickinson and Todd had a friendship “founded and nurtured on their mutual love of music” (9). Cooley repeats Todd’s claim that the music she played for Emily was classical, mentioning the composers Beethoven, Bach, and Scarlatti by name.

¹⁵ Moreover, the story closely resembles that of one told by Clara Newman, Dickinson’s cousin. Newman insists that although Dickinson at one time played piano well, her repertoire shrank to only a few tunes, and from there, only to listening to others play the piano from the staircase. She explains:

After she became more reclusive, and gave up the piano entirely, I had the pleasure of playing for her and quite often would come to me just some little word as, “Emily is tired, and the sweet voice in the parlor cannot speak to her alone,” or “There’s a voice in the down-stairs; I call but it does not answer.” I answered the summons when I could, and never without some acknowledgment. Sometimes a flower on the piano stool, again a little plate of fresh cookies, or best of all, a word written out for me. (Newman qtd. in Sewall 272–3)

¹⁶ Sheet music usually refers to music sold as a single song (sometimes part of a series). During the 19th century, it differs from what were known as “song sheets,” which were usually only a single sheet of paper with the lyrics of a printed on it. Sheet music popularly circulated because it was cheap to print and distribute and also because it was easy for the musician to use to create their own personal bound music book, incorporating various types of music ranging from classical to popular. Dickinson and the women in her family all bound their own music in this way. For more on the bound music book belonging to Emily, see Boziwick, “Emily Dickinson’s Music Book: A Performative Exploration,” especially 83–89. Boziwick also reveals that Emily’s musical communication also occurred in her relationship with her brother, Austin, as he would procure music for her to play when he traveled to large cities such as Boston (89).

¹⁷ I am a classically trained vocalist and a pianist and have also played the flute (solo and orchestral), but have only recently started learning guitar. At the time I visited the archive, I did not play guitar at all, and so could not determine the level of difficulty with any certainty. The age and type of these guitar tunes might be of interest to scholars working on guitar music and its history.

¹⁸ Unfortunately, I could not, with any certainty, identify any of the handwriting as Emily’s on my own. After sending images of the most likely candidates to manuscript scholars and the Dickinson Museum, I was told that none of those were likely to be Emily’s handwriting. They were most likely written by a young Martha whose handwriting somewhat resembles Dickinson’s when written in haste.

¹⁹ Sheet music, as opposed to music sold already bound as books, dominated the U.S. market before the advent of strict copyright controls for music publications. It is not a coincidence that I discovered most of the Bianchi archive at Brown to be comprised of unbound sheet music, and that the archive included quite a lot of popular song, the sort that Tin Pan Alley publishers specialized in; this type of music would have been common not only for music students during Dickinson’s lifetime, but throughout Martha’s as well.

²⁰ For a detailed account of how Alfred and Mary Hampson came to live in and care for the Evergreens, see Barton Levi St. Armand, “The Keeper of the Keys: Mary Hampson, the Evergreens, and the Art Within.” However, St. Armand neglects to spend any length of time on Martha’s music or on her Steinway grand piano, which evidence from the Bianchi archive indicates the Hampsons cared for and used after Martha’s death and which, by Martha’s own accounts of her musical career, was very important to her. For a brief description of Alfred and Mary’s relationship with Martha, see also “Martha Dickinson (Mattie) Bianchi (1866–1943), niece” on the Emily Dickinson Museum website.

²¹ Small notes that while Rubinstein’s tour and music made a deep impression on Dickinson, the dates of his tour coincide with a point in her life when she was no longer traveling, and so could not have attended the concert. It is more likely, Small claims, that Dickinson heard about the concert from friends or relatives who did attend. According to R. Allen Lott, Rubinstein did perform as close to Dickinson’s home as Springfield on October 21, 1872 (303). But we currently have no evidence that she attended a concert herself. Further attention is needed to the Rubinstein sheet music in the collection to ascertain whether these songs also provided Dickinson with an avenue for understanding the greatness of Rubinstein’s music, if only secondhand through arrangements played by others, possibly including her niece. For connections between Rubinstein and Dickinson, see Small, 50–51 and n. 20 228. For information on Rubinstein’s 1872–3 tour, see Lott, “Anton Rubinstein in America (1872–1873).”

²² According to Lodewijk Muns, this misidentification is actually an error that goes back to von Weber’s lifetime. See: lodewijkmuns.nl/2018/05/07/that-wild-waltz-of-von-webers/.

²³ Another curious Dickinson-Rubinstein connection here is that this piece dates to around the time Rubinstein became acquainted with Jenny Lind, the opera singer that Dickinson so admired, and composed several series of art song cycles. 1850 is also around the time that Lind toured the U.S. Perhaps this piece was chosen not only for its technical difficulty but also because it put the listeners in mind of a concert they wanted to remember.

²⁴ For discussions on Rubinstein in comparison to his contemporaries, his students, his contributions to music education, and how he fit into the larger context of the development of Russian, German, and French classical music during the 19^th century, see Philip S. Taylor, Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Showa Women’s University; The University of Tokyo.