Instructions, Introductions, Treatises and Tutors: Music for the Regency Miss

As a musicologist, I’m currently researching legal deposit music registered at Stationers’ Hall in the late Georgian era, with an initial focus on the collection at the University of St Andrews. Whilst the question of what was registered and what survives across the country is of interest per se, this study at the collection level enables me to take a closer look from various different angles. I can not only examine which music composed by women was eventually chosen to be bound into library volumes, but also analyse which books were used by women learning music. Although this was a university library collection, professors were allowed to borrow on behalf of their friends, and much of their music borrowing was in fact for the use of unmarried women – including, of course, their daughters!
By means of detailed data collection and analysis, I am able to determine which music was most often borrowed, by whom and for whom, with a granularity that can even distinguish between didactic and more recreational material. It is these findings that I propose to share, providing hard evidence of what middle-class young women played and sang in their pursuit of marriageable musical excellence circa 1800-36.