Interspersed with Musical Entertainment - Music in Greek Salons of the 19th Century

Athens: Kentro Hellenikes Mousikes, 2017. In English. Soft cover, 24 cm, 248 pp.; net weight 520 gr. ISBN: 978-618-80006-4-3.

The subject matter of the present book is the music of the salon, a frequently misunderstood institution that came into its own in the early nineteenth century as a key component of formalized sociability. The salon embraced a diversity of activities [...] and a diversity of social groups, from bourgeois soirees to dazzling aristocratic gatherings where the most famous personalities of the day would assemble. But common to most was music [...].

This book illuminates one corner of a larger story of musical patronage that extends from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, a story in which women really do occupy centre stage.

[...] The anthology provided here helps to restore something of the immediacy of musical practices that are 'of their time' and 'of their place'. It constitutes an act of recovery, and it makes concrete the 'little stories' of multiple Hellenic cultures relayed by our authors. [...] The great virtue of this volume by Avra Xepapadakou and Alexandros Charkiolakis is that it allows us to see around the edges of familiar, canonised portraits of music, musicians, and music-making. It takes us backstage.

Jim Samson