ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part explores music and masculinity in the middle Ages. It discusses the perception of music as an effeminizing agent, especially as it is mediated through the discourse of melancholy, in early modern England. The part focuses on scholarship from a range of disciplines, adopting a variety of methodological approaches to explore the processes of somatization that were embedded in medical and lay discourses on melancholy, music and masculinity. It deals with uncovering, and making explicit, the previously little explored, or acknowledged, centrality of the virility/effeminacy dichotomy in the reception of two canonical composers–Joseph Haydn and Hector Berlioz. The part also deals with the ways in which discourses about effeminacy impacted upon the reception of Haydn in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany and the United States of America.
