Candace Bailey

This project explores how women from across the southern United States used music in pursuit of gentility, thereby challenging the modern tendency to assign both gentility and parlor music to the white middle class alone. Through music, women participated in a gendered practice that placed embodied performance within clearly defined social environments. Deploying music as a form of cultural capital, they transformed their social positions and gained power both within and outside of their own circles. The grant will support archival research in Boston and Chicago, as well as course coverage during the academic year.

In 1887, Edmond Dédé, a Black composer born in New Orleans, completed his grand opera “Morgiane” while living in France. He submitted it to the main theater in Bordeaux, but it never received a premiere. It has lain in manuscript since that time, with the result that no one has been able to describe its music and situate it within his style and career. Using a new transcription of the work, this project rectifies that neglect with two chapters for a monograph on the opera and its context in Dédé’s life. This research constitutes the first examination foregrounding the composer’s music. One of this project’s chapters deals with the composition’s performance requirements. This first full-length opera by a single Black composer requires a large orchestra, virtuoso singers, and chorus. Given that the composer spent much of his life working in significantly smaller venues, his abilities to create such imaginative atmospheres also merits serious examination because all of the extant music attributed to him is for voice accompanied by piano or piano solo. Questions of alterity and Otherness in an opera composed by a man who was himself always cast as Other concern the other chapter in this project.