Rebecca Cypess is associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the author of Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• List of Figures, Musical Examples, and Audio ExamplesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Musical Salons as Liminal Spaces: Salonnières as Agents of Musical Culture2 Sensuality, Sociability, and Sympathy: Musical Salon Practices as Enactments of Enlightenment3 Ephemerae and Authorship in the Salon of Madame Brillon4 Composition, Collaboration, and the Cultivation of Skill in the Salon of Marianna Martines5 The Cultural Work of Collecting and Performing in the Salon of Sara Levy6 Musical Improvisation and Poetic Painting in the Salon of Angelica Kauffman7 Reading Musically in the Salon of Elizabeth GraemeConclusionBibliographyIndex

“Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment is a fascinating, imaginative, and richly detailed study of musical salon culture in the late eighteenth century. As Cypess argues, while salon culture in general has been extensively explored, musical salons have not. The women at the salons’ centers have often been treated as accessories to the male ‘geniuses’ they have supported, their own musical productions and activities ignored. But Cypess takes a fundamentally new approach, attempting to reimagine and recreate the lived musical experiences of those social spaces. This is an important and compelling book, executed with verve and authority, carefully considered and argued, and richly presented.”