Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Julio Ortega. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-205).

This dissertation studies the musical activities of the Venezuelan pianist and composer Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) during her formative years in Caracas. It examines the sources that pertain to her musical environment, early piano training, and first compositions in the context of the growth in Caracas of the practices of recreational sociability, the increasing influence of virtuosic music, and the tradition of private concert-making sponsored by devoted music amateurs. This study argues that Teresa Carreño’s musical upbringing occurred in a social and cultural context in which Enlightenment-framed ideologies of civilization and social progress, shaped in fundamental ways the perceptions of the value of music and women in society, and their role in the newly-founded republic. This study is aimed at reconstructing Teresa Carreño’s musical activities in Caracas as a means for elucidating the values, aspirations, and contradictions of Caracas’s musical culture and how these were articulated within the broader context of the nation-building process that was shaped and promoted by the progressive intelligentsia since the early nineteenth-century.