Hester Bell Jordan
I received my Ph.D. in Musicology from McGill University with a concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2024, after completing my M.Mus. in Musicology (2015) and B.Mus. in Violin Performance (2013) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
My research explores women’s musical activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on their contributions to unexpected areas of the music industry such as instrument making and publishing. Examining the lives of figures like piano maker Nannette Streicher-Stein (1769–1833), the music publishers Marie-Françoise Bonnemaison née Marcoux (1777-1851) and Catherine-Barbe Delahante née Marcoux (1779-1813), and violinist Regina Strinasacchi (1761–1839), my work considers themes including gender, class, labour, family, and self-fashioning. In 2022 I received an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society for my doctoral dissertation on Streicher-Stein and the Marcoux sisters, titled “‘Charming Daughters’ and A ‘Notorious Lady’: Two Women-Led Music Businesses in Europe, 1780–1830.”
Upcoming projects include an edition of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B-flat Major (c. 1780s) and a journal article on the historiography of Streicher-Stein’s work as a piano maker.
My research explores women’s musical activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on their contributions to unexpected areas of the music industry such as instrument making and publishing. Examining the lives of figures like piano maker Nannette Streicher-Stein (1769–1833), the music publishers Marie-Françoise Bonnemaison née Marcoux (1777-1851) and Catherine-Barbe Delahante née Marcoux (1779-1813), and violinist Regina Strinasacchi (1761–1839), my work considers themes including gender, class, labour, family, and self-fashioning. In 2022 I received an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society for my doctoral dissertation on Streicher-Stein and the Marcoux sisters, titled “‘Charming Daughters’ and A ‘Notorious Lady’: Two Women-Led Music Businesses in Europe, 1780–1830.”
Upcoming projects include an edition of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B-flat Major (c. 1780s) and a journal article on the historiography of Streicher-Stein’s work as a piano maker.
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Thesis Chapters by Hester Bell Jordan
music as artisans, businesspeople, patrons, and performers, forming social and professional networks through music and economically supporting themselves and their families. Bringing feminist theory and historical understandings of gender to bear on these figures for the first time,
this research draws on a wealth of primary documents (such as letters, marriage contracts, and financial records) to explore how gender, labour, class, family, legal conditions, and music interacted in their lives and businesses. It presents in-depth biographies of Streicher-Stein and the
Marcoux sisters and explores how collaboration with family members and the development of shared, professional networks was essential to their work as musical businesswomen. This project considers the musical products made by Streicher-Stein and the Marcoux—sheet music and pianos—and examines how they used these objects, print culture, and musical performance to negotiate their public personas as prominent women in the music industry. Presenting these women as multifaceted musical and social actors, this research helps reframe women’s musical work in this period by revealing the variety and extent of their labour.
the effect of obscuring players of less typical instruments. Violin-playing, frequently cast as a man’s activity and imbued with indecent associations, was a case in point. Yet despite the connotations of the instrument, a small but significant group of women did play the violin: it is these violinists that this thesis takes as its central focus. Looking first
at the complex reasons behind objections to women’s violin performance, a number of factors that restricted women’s access to the violin – including the influence of the male gaze and limits placed on women’s physical movement – are revealed. Particular conditions nevertheless enabled certain women to play the violin, namely the personal, educational, and economic support available from diverse sources such as family members, patrons, and institutions like convents and the Venetian ospedali.
In addition to placing women violinists in their historical context, this thesis centres on an analysis of a violin concerto by one of the most well-known female violinists of the era, the Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The analysis of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B flat major is strongly performance based and focuses on the issue of gender and physical movement (performance gesture), topics which were of much interest to eighteenth-century commentators who witnessed women violinists performing. As such the analysis engages with concepts from “embodied” musicology. In exploring Strinasacchi’s concerto we see that female violinists could experiment with a variety of gendered roles through violin performance, embodying both masculinity and femininity through their transgressive gestures. By taking a closer look at women’s violin performance and experiences, this thesis aims to show that these violinists were not as peripheral to the workings of the wider musical community as is sometimes implied. Furthermore, it aims to put women violinists more firmly at the centre of their own stories, challenging the tendency to treat female violinists as novel anomalies.
Papers by Hester Bell Jordan
music as artisans, businesspeople, patrons, and performers, forming social and professional networks through music and economically supporting themselves and their families. Bringing feminist theory and historical understandings of gender to bear on these figures for the first time,
this research draws on a wealth of primary documents (such as letters, marriage contracts, and financial records) to explore how gender, labour, class, family, legal conditions, and music interacted in their lives and businesses. It presents in-depth biographies of Streicher-Stein and the
Marcoux sisters and explores how collaboration with family members and the development of shared, professional networks was essential to their work as musical businesswomen. This project considers the musical products made by Streicher-Stein and the Marcoux—sheet music and pianos—and examines how they used these objects, print culture, and musical performance to negotiate their public personas as prominent women in the music industry. Presenting these women as multifaceted musical and social actors, this research helps reframe women’s musical work in this period by revealing the variety and extent of their labour.
the effect of obscuring players of less typical instruments. Violin-playing, frequently cast as a man’s activity and imbued with indecent associations, was a case in point. Yet despite the connotations of the instrument, a small but significant group of women did play the violin: it is these violinists that this thesis takes as its central focus. Looking first
at the complex reasons behind objections to women’s violin performance, a number of factors that restricted women’s access to the violin – including the influence of the male gaze and limits placed on women’s physical movement – are revealed. Particular conditions nevertheless enabled certain women to play the violin, namely the personal, educational, and economic support available from diverse sources such as family members, patrons, and institutions like convents and the Venetian ospedali.
In addition to placing women violinists in their historical context, this thesis centres on an analysis of a violin concerto by one of the most well-known female violinists of the era, the Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The analysis of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B flat major is strongly performance based and focuses on the issue of gender and physical movement (performance gesture), topics which were of much interest to eighteenth-century commentators who witnessed women violinists performing. As such the analysis engages with concepts from “embodied” musicology. In exploring Strinasacchi’s concerto we see that female violinists could experiment with a variety of gendered roles through violin performance, embodying both masculinity and femininity through their transgressive gestures. By taking a closer look at women’s violin performance and experiences, this thesis aims to show that these violinists were not as peripheral to the workings of the wider musical community as is sometimes implied. Furthermore, it aims to put women violinists more firmly at the centre of their own stories, challenging the tendency to treat female violinists as novel anomalies.