What seems to be Cathers theme in the story? How would you say the central episode of the concert contributes to this theme?

Gender dynamics play a significant role in this text. As a young woman, Aunt Georgiana's work as a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory fulfilled a very specific kind of gender role, one that was available perhaps only to women in Boston in the latter half of the 19th century. When she marries Howard and elopes with him to Nebraska, she adopts a different gender role: one of a frontier woman, in charge of a vulnerable homestead. Clark observes this very gendered transformation through his own, no less gendered, lens. As a young man, his experience both of the Nebraska homestead and of the Boston music scene was very different from his aunt's; and yet, he assumes they view the world in the same way.