The Expansive Imagination: Women, Musical Thought, and Large-Scale Form

A lecture by Dr Nicole Grimes (Music) for the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.

Women's musical education in the long nineteenth century was shaped by a persistent contradiction. Music was considered an important component of feminine accomplishment and cultivation, yet women were routinely denied access to the forms of education, professional authority, and public participation through which musical judgment might be exercised on a larger scale. What might a history of music look like if we approached women's musical activity not through the familiar categories of exclusion and recovery, but through the cultivation and exercise of their intellectual and creative agency?

This lecture takes Mary Wollstonecraft's writings on education and human development as a point of departure for considering the musical worlds of Hélène de Montgeroult and Emilie Mayer. Wollstonecraft's critique of an education organised around feminine attractiveness and “accomplishment” was accompanied by a radically expansive conception of cultivation, one directed toward the development of reason, imagination, judgment, fellowship, and participation in public life. Her writings offer a suggestive historical vocabulary for reconsidering the kinds of musical agency exercised by women across the nineteenth century.

Montgeroult's creative dialogue with the violinist and composer Giovanni Battista Viotti and Mayer's participation in the public culture of the symphony represent very different manifestations of that agency. Yet both demonstrate women engaging inherited musical forms through acts of judgment, transformation, and structural imagination. Bringing the work of these composers into dialogue with debates about women's education and cultivation, this talk considers what happens when we move beyond the paradigm of musical “accomplishment” and restore women's artistic, compositional work to a broader history of musical thought, participation, and intellectual agency.

About the speaker:
Dr Nicole Grimes is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Music at TCD. Her research focuses at the intersection between German music criticism, analysis & aesthetics from the late-18th century to the present. She is currently working on a multi-year project: "The Expansive Canvas: Large-Scale Form in the Music of Women Composers." Her monograph Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (CUP, 2019) was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Book Prize of the SMI, and was one of nine Notable Music Books of 2019 selected by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. She has just completed her new book Emilie Mayer—The Berlin Concerts: Breaking the Symphonic Glass Ceiling in the 1850s, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is the General Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks at Cambridge University Press. 

This event is run in accordance with Trinity’s Dignity and Respect policy, and its commitment to nurturing a respectful and inclusive research culture.
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