Dance Music Collections and Georgian Performance Practices at the Bath Assembly Rooms
In 2026 the National Trust plans to reopen the Bath Assembly Rooms with an immersive visitor experience telling the story of the Rooms in their Georgian heyday, with associated display objects and audio content. Among the music objects, the array of dance music collections produced by publishers in the decades following the opening of the Rooms in 1771 offer both an insight into changing dance fashions over several decades, and the symbiotic relationship between music performance at the Assembly Rooms, publication industries and systems of patronage. This paper will explore how, through these objects, the Rooms became a powerful international advertising tool for both British and foreign dance teachers and composers, and for Bath musicians marketing their own compositions to wider audiences. Most of these dance collections were published after the season and rearranged for the domestic market, however, distancing them from their Assembly Room dance band performance contexts. This paper will therefore examine some of the questions they raise about performance practices at the Rooms, including dance band instrumentation, arrangement and leadership. It will also explore what they might tell us about the dissemination of music associated with Bath, and the role of dance music as mementos or souvenirs.
Chloe Valenti is a member of the National Trust’s Specialist Advice Network, researching music performance practices in Georgian Bath for the Bath Assembly Rooms Project. As part of her research, she recently completed an Albi Rosenthal Visiting Research Fellowship at the Bodleian Library. Her research will inform the curatorial narrative, sensory environment and choice of display objects in the visitor offer when the Rooms reopen to the public. She has published articles on Italian opera reception in Victorian London, opera and nineteenth- century British popular song, music and health in nineteenth-century Britain, Victorian women composers of opera and popular song, and nineteenth-century choral music. Her essay ‘Opera and British Choral Culture: Verdi’s Requiem in London’ appears in Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain, published by Routledge. She has also contributed a chapter on Music Criticism and the Press for Verdi in Context, forthcoming for Cambridge University Press.