Overhearing Music (and) History with Vernon Lee

This essay reads Victorian writer Vernon Lee’s notion of “overhearing” as a mode of aesthetics-oriented historiography that accounts for the tension between personal attachment and scholarly detachment in writing about art. Derived from (though not limited to) music’s peculiarities as a corporeal, temporal art form, “overhearing” enabled Lee to recover a forgotten period in music’s history by framing her engagement with past artworks and practices as undertaken from not inside but rather alongside them.