Gossip and Anecdote

Abstract

This chapter explores the persistent appeal of gossip and anecdote about musical subjects, especially those tied to canonical or canon-adjacent figures in Western music history. Using the sensationalized popular reception histories of Antonio Salieri and Pyotr Tchaikovsky as case studies and drawing on recent frameworks developed in rhetoric and literary studies to address conspiratorial thought, it considers how specific claims move across and between spoken gossip, printed anecdote, nonfiction biography and life-writing, and fiction. This repetition and reinterpretation can grant certain narratives seeming legitimacy as part of what the chapter terms “canonical gossip,” which serves to reinforce broader narratives about which composers and musical works are included or excluded from the Western musical canon. The chapter concludes with some observations of how canonical gossip continues to function today and what can be done to provide a fuller, more nuanced, and more accurate view of music history.