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Mélanie Traversier: “News on the Davies Sisters”
Monday, May 2, 2022 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
**This event will take place in English**
Open in person to the NYU community ONLY (staff, students, faculty). REGISTER HERE
Open online to all, via Zoom. REGISTER HERE
La Maison Française is pleased to welcome Mélanie Traversier for a fascinating talk, entitled: “News on the Davies Sisters. Investigations on two forgotten « franklinian » musicians in Enlightenment Europe.”
This talk is dedicated to the professional and geographical itinerary of two women musicians in the Enlightenment Europe, the instrumentalist Mary Ann Davies and her younger sister Cecilia, an opera singer. Today forgotten, they were nevertheless highly acclaimed in their time: Benjamin Franklin chose Mary Ann Davies to promote the glass harmonica he had designed in London in the early 1760s, and Cecilia Davies was one fot the first English singers to perform on the Italian stage. Their case, illuminated by sparse and incomplete documentation, allows us to measure the agency of women artists in the 18th century, and to question the logic of invisibilisation of professional women musicians at work in the history of music.