Popular Music of the Parlor and Stage

Musical theater was not a term the eighteenth century would have recognized, as a small orchestra and singers were expected to be part of all theatrical occasions. Instrumental music, purposely unobtrusive, was background to plays and other dramatic presentations. Songs with greater intrinsic interest to audiences were more in the foreground and were often interpolated into plays or featured between plays or acts of plays, yet they too remained relatively minor aspects of the evening’s entertainment...