Output details

Entertaining Miss Austen: newly discovered music from Jane Austen's family collection

Research content/process:

Entertaining Miss Austen sprung from Southampton's 'At Home With Music' research project in collaboration with colleagues in Music and English. In 2007-9 the project unearthed nine previously unstudied music albums of music compiled by Austen family members between 1760-1815. These privately owned volumes intersect with eight extant music books already known to Austen scholarship but little studied as documents of domestic performance practice. Norris worked with all 17 sources to create an overview of the domestic repertory as experienced by gentry families of modest income such as the Austens. Searching family memoirs, correspondence, and Jane Austen's novels for indications of repertory and performance choices fed into the selection, which includes 15 modern premiere recordings. Among these are three pieces identified by Austen's niece as those Austen regularly performed during her most intense creative years after 1809. Tracing connections between song quotations in Austen letters, the sparser concrete musical references in the novels (eg, to Cramer) and music albums allowed Norris to establish connections between Austen's musical experiences and her fictional worlds. The albums often present problematic readings, particularly in the manuscripts where copies are frequently incomplete (eg tune or tune plus bass only) or lack attributions; in other cases the albums present supplementary information not included in contemporary prints (eg fingerings). In bringing the music to performance Norris compared MS readings to contemporary print copies to provide a fuller picture of how domestic music sources reflect performance practice for songs and keyboard music c. 1800. Entertaining Miss Austen was first presented at New Directions in Austen Research conference at Chawton House Library (2009), at Turner Sims, Southampton (2010), Georgian Festival, Poole (2010), American Friends of the Georgian Group (2011) and Hatchlands (2012). It was recorded at Hatchlands on an 1817 Broadwood piano formerly belonging to Cramer.