Estimated read time: 25 minutes

Unfit for Intellectual Effort: Critical Condemnations of Salon Music in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The Paradox of the Parlour Throughout the nineteenth century, a particular genre of music flourished, not in the grand, newly constructed concert halls of Europe, but in the intimate drawing-rooms of the burgeoning bourgeoisie. This was ‘salon music’, a category of composition primarily written for the solo piano, designed to be performed in the semi-private…