Sites of Empowerment: Fin-de-Siècle Salon Culture and the Music of Cécile Chaminade

Grindley, Ann (2025). Sites of Empowerment: Fin-de-Siècle Salon Culture and the Music of Cécile Chaminade. In: Hamer, Laura and Minors, Helen Julia eds. The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond. New York: Routledge, pp. 65–78.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003024767-7

Abstract

Marcia J. Citron, the leading Chaminade scholar, argues that many women composers who were active during the 1900s and across the fin-de-siècle period have been linked negatively to the salons and salon culture. She argues that Cécile Chaminade provides a case in point. Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) was a pianist and composer active in fin-de-siècle Paris. She completed around 400 compositions (many of them piano works), of which nearly all were published. In 1913 she received the honour of becoming the first female composer to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur. Beyond France, Chaminade was popular in Britain, where she toured annually and performed for Queen Victoria, and in the US, where she conducted an extensive tour and where many Chaminade Clubs were formed by enthusiasts for her music around 1900. Citron argues, however, that although Chaminade was extremely popular through 1910, her reputation was tarnished through mere association with the salon. Citron cites The New Grove Dictionary from 1980, as perpetuating this perspective by including Gustave Ferrari's entry from Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, from 1911, which states that Chaminade's music is intended for the drawing room. She also writes that Nicolas Slonimsky has deployed the salon as a sign of trivial music in his definition of ‘pseudo-music’ in Music Since 1900, 4th edition, from 1971. 7 Citron states:

These accounts typify the pervasive twentieth-century association of women with the salon, and the salon with marginal artistic activity. The social and stylistic democratization in the salon has reinforced negative gender associations.

She suggests that the reason for this is that the salons have been denigrated as feminised spaces and were therefore not beneficial to those who participated in them. She goes on to explain that much of this denigration can be attributed to ‘male society’ beginning to ‘fear the salon as a site of female power’, and she asserts that a deliberate suppression of women was conducted through ‘discreditation: denigration of the mixing of the personal and the artistic within the home’.