ABSTRACT
This chapter is drawn from a larger, ongoing research project concerning the history of American live music; and so I will begin with some observations concerning the challenge of studying the subject of ‘live music’ in historical perspective and understanding ‘liveness’ as a historical phenomenon. There are compelling reasons to make gender central to the history of live music, which I will address using a series of examples starting with the mid-nineteenth century Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind. Looking beyond Lind, I will examine some of the ways in which the image and style of female musical and theatrical performers shifted in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth in connection with a series of new performance venues, the variety theater and vaudeville in particular. Throughout, my principal concern lies with two interrelated lines of inquiry: first, how was gender implicated in the position that musical performance came to occupy in the public life of the USA from the middle of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth; and second, how did female performers adapt their personae to changing standards surrounding the public performance of femininity during these same years?
