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Abstract
That women in elite domestic settings sought musical accomplishment in Regency Britain is a noted feature of the period, but the acquisition of musical knowledge has yet to be examined holistically. With a focus on manuscript sources associated with the Ouseley family in the Bodleian Library (Tenbury collection), in this lecture I argue that copying, arranging, harmonizing, analyzing, and teaching constituted central forms of musical training that have been insufficiently recognized in modern scholarship. I take as my point of departure Sir Frederick Ouseley’s oft-repeated claim that he “was never taught music,” a statement long accepted as evidence of innate genius and informal self-instruction. By situating this claim within the material practices of the Ouseley household, and especially the extensive musical work of his elder sister Mary Jane, the lecture demonstrates how such assertions depend upon a narrow definition of musical instruction—one that systematically discounts domestic pedagogy and women’s musical labor.
Drawing on annotated treatises, composition exercises corrected by Johann Bernhard Logier, extensive manuscript volumes in Mary Jane Ouseley’s hand, and patterns of cataloguing and attribution within the Tenbury collection, we can see that women played a substantive role in the transmission of musical knowledge at precisely the moment when narratives of musical genius were being consolidated. Rather than presenting an anomalous case, the Ouseley materials invite broader reconsideration of how musical authority, training, and authorship were structured and gendered in early nineteenth-century Britain. By foregrounding notational practice as a site of knowledge production, I propose a reframing of musical work itself and ask how our historiography might change if we attend more closely to the domestic, archival, and gendered conditions under which musical expertise was formed.
Biography
Candace Bailey, PhD, is the Neville Distinguished Professor at North Carolina Central University (Durham, USA) and a fellow this year at the National Humanities Center. The author of several books (including Unbinding Gentility of 2021), articles, and chapters on British keyboard music of the Baroque and women and music in the nineteenth-century US-South, her work on binder’s volumes now extends from examples from South America to Europe. This spring she will be part of a spring school in Hannover, teaching methodologies surrounding the use of these materials, which will culminate in a conference in Vienna in June. Dr. Bailey’s most recent publication, a handbook on Edmond Dédé’s 1887 opera Morgiane, ou le Sultan d’Isphahan, will be available in 2026 from Cambridge University Press, and her next project centers on women and music composition in Regency Britain. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the Bodleian Library, the National Humanities Center, and other institutions.
