Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 9780520083950, 0520083954

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Cultivating Music in America

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SSOCLALER LTESS.

Cultivating Music in America Women Patrons and Actwists since 1860

EDITED BY

Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous publication grants from the American Musicological Society and the Sonneck Society for American Music.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Author name. Title/ Author.

p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index ISBN 0-520-

1. First category—subcategory. 2. Second category— subcategory. I. Title.

callnumber year

numbers’ numbers—dc number lc number Printed in the United States of America

87654321

2739.48-1984. ,

‘The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x1 INTRODUCTION:

Music Patronage as a “Female-Centered Cultural Process”

Ralph P Locke and Gyntla Barr I

1. Patronage—and Women—1in America’s Musical Lite:

An Overview of a Changing Scene ]

Ralph PR Locke and Cynlla Barr 24

VIGNETTE A. Women and Church Organs: 1830s—1860s

Documents with Gommentary by Stephen L. Pinel 54 VIGNETTE B. The “Grand Composers” of the Present Day: Betty Freeman Discusses How She Chooses and Supports ‘Them

Interview with Annotations by Ralph PR Locke 59 2. Women as “Keepers of Culture”: Music Clubs, Community Concert Series, and Symphony Orchestras

Linda Whitesitt 65

VIGNETTE C. “The Facts of (Music Club) Life” in the 1960s

Mary Natvig 87 Ralph P Locke go as Seen by Mother and Daughter

3. Living with Music: Isabella Stewart Gardner

vu Contents VIGNETTE D. Playing for Mrs. Gardner Alone:

The Violinist Harrison Keller Reminisces

Annotated by Ralph P Locke 122 VIGNETTE E. Premieres of Sibelius and Others in the Connecticut Hills: Garl and Ellen Battell Stoeckel’s Norfolk Music Festivals

Pamela F. Perry 124

VIGNETTE F. Maria Dehon Helps Olga Samaroff and Leopold Stokowski

Geoffrey E. McGillen 129

Emanuel Rubin 134

4. Jeannette Meyer Thurber (1850-1946): Music for a Democracy

Joseph Horowitz 164

5. Laura Langford and the Seidl Society: Wagner Gomes to Brooklyn

Cyrilla Barr 185

6. AStyle of Her Own: The Patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge VIGNETTE G. Coolidge on Gowns, Dedications,

and American Musical Chauvinism

Annotated by Cyrilla Barr 204 VIGNETTE H. Mildred Bliss ‘ells Nadia Boulanger

to Think of Herself for Once

Annotated by Jeanice Brooks 209 7. “As Large as She Gan Make It”: The Role of Black Women Activists in Music, 1880-1945

Doris Evans McGinty 214

8. Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music:

Carol F. Oja 237

New York in the 1920s

VIGNETTE I. The Power of Social Events: Aaron Copland’s Guest List for a Post-Concert Reception Given by Blanche Walton

Annotated by Carol 7. Oya 262 g. Culture, Feminism, and the Sacred: Sophie Drinker’s Musical

Ruth A. Sole 266

Activism

Contents vit VIGNETTE J. Music at the Drinkers’: Claribel Thomson

and Alfred Mann Recollect

Annotated by Ralph P Locke 290 ro. Reflections on Art Music in America, on Stereotypes of the Woman Patron, and on Chaille)nges in the Present and Future

Ralph P Locke 295

INDEX 341

CONTRIBUTORS 337

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece. Alma M. Wertheim, with Louis Gruenberg, Aaron Copland, and Emerson Whithorne / _ frontispiece

1. Adella Prentiss Hughes / 47

2. Betty Freeman / 67 3. Ella May Smith / 7o

4. Helen Herron Taft / 75 5. Isabella Stewart Gardner in the Music Room, Beacon Street / gi

6. Isabella Stewart Gardner at “Green Hil” / 95 7. The glass-roofed courtyard at Fenway Court / 96 8. Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1907 / 97 9g. The Music Room at Fenway Court / 99 10. Maria Dehon Polk and Dr. William Polk / 730

11. Jeannette Thurber / 137 12. Dvorak’s concert for the Herald clothing fund (1894) / 154

13. Soprano Sissieretta Jones / 155

14. Laura Langford / 167 15. Brighton Beach program cover (1889) / 4168 16. Charcoal drawing of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge by John Singer Sargent (1923) / 4186

x Lllustrations 17. Ehzabeth Sprague Coolidge playing chamber music

with her son Sprague / 189 18. ‘(The Pro Arte Quartet on the stage

of the Mills College Auditorium / 194 19. Caricature by Carl Engel of Elizabeth Sprague

Coolidge and himself / 206 20. Program of a concert conducted by Nadia Boulanger featuring the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1938) / 210

21. Lulu Vere Childers / 223 22. Call for contributions to the National Negro Opera Company / 225

23. Maud Cuney-Hare / 226

24. Nora Holt / 228 25. Marion Walton Putnam and Blanche Walton / 243 26. Bertha Fiering Tapper and students, ca.1908 / 246 27. Claire Raphael Reis and Max Rosen / 247 28. Miguel Covarrubias, “A Salon Recital of Modern Music” / 2593

29. Guest list drawn up by Aaron Copland for a post-concert reception / 264 30. Cecilia Beaux, honeymoon portrait of Henry and Sophie Drinker / 269 31. A singing party in the Drinkers’ music room at Merion, ca.1950 / 272 32. Advertising flyer for Sophie Drinker’s book Music and Women / 277

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We, the two editors, began our work on this project separately, each toiling for several years, amid other endeavors, at a study of a given woman patron (the subjects of Chapters 3 and 6) and each feeling repeated frustration that there was no large study of women’s patronage of art music in America to consult. Finally, we learned of each other’s existence, exchanged manuscripts and tales of woe, and decided to try to put together something like that phantom larger study. No sooner had we breathed word of our plan to the scholarly community than one contributor after another came forward with marvelous chapters and documentary vignettes. The shape of the book that resulted is explained toward the end of our Introduction. Here let us simply acknowledge the encouragement and support we have received along the way from all the contributors (who responded promptly and thoughtfully to our sometimes insistent requests), as well as from the confidential readers secured by the University of California Press: a cultural historian, a social historian, and two musicologists. We particularly wish to thank various kindly advisors: ‘hese included, at the very outset, Ruth A. Solie and Joseph Kerman and,

at somewhat later stages, Dena Epstein, Adrienne Fried Block, Alfred Mann, Nancy B. Reich, Kerala J. Snyder, and Judith ‘Tick. Doris Kretschmer, Peter Dreyer, Paul Psoinos, and Cindy Fulton were understanding editors throughout the process, and Lee Brentlinger prepared the index with care and insight. On a more personal note, Ralph Locke wishes to dedicate his part of this project, with love, to Lona M. Farhi and to Marti and Susannah Locke, and to thank his parents, Doris Locke and the late Merle I. Locke, for support and encouragement early on. Cyrilla Barr dedicates her part of the project to the memory of her parents, her own first Keepers of Musical Culture.

RPL CB

Rochester, N.Y. Washington, D.C. x1

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Introduction Music Patronage as a “Female-Centered Cultural Process” Ralph P Locke and Cyrnilla Barr

‘he various authors of the present collective work would most likely cheer the insightful agenda that the composer and critic David Schiff proposed in the New Republic just as we were all finishing our chapters. Certainly, his words delighted the two editors, who now gladly offer the finished book as one response to Schiff’s wide-ranging call: Until recently, of course, women have played very little part in [music] composition. ... But women have long played a great role in performance, patronage, and peda-

gogy. Imagine twentieth-century music without [the harpsichordist] Wanda Landowska, [the composition teacher] Nadia Boulanger, [such patrons as] the Princesse de Polignac, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Betty Freeman, [or the professors of piano and violin, respectively,] Rosina Lhévinne and Dorothy DeLay. If performers were given their rightful place in the history of music, it could easily be shown that [ Maria] Callas exerted a far greater influence on the course of opera in the past forty years than any composer did. Might not feminist musicology profitably shift the focus away from a male-controlled cultural product to a female-centered cultural process, and celebrate these areas of real feminine dominance? Our notion of music would be appropriately challenged and enriched.!

Throughout the world and throughout history, women have been intensely involved in the consumption and (to varying extents) production of music.* This was certainly the case for Western art music in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, the primary focus of this book. A terminological aside may help here. What we call “Western art music” is essentially equivalent to what is often called “classical” music. It is characterized in part by its reliance on written musical texts—composed scores—that are highly

prescriptive of the notes to be played and how to play them, far more so than tends to be the case with jazz or folk or popular music. ‘The terms “art music” and I

2 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR “classical music” are not unproblematic, but neither are any of the usual alternatives—for example, “serious,” “concert,” or “cultivated” music.’ Nonetheless, in part for reasons of convenience, some of the studies in this volume invoke one or more of these terms, or else simply refer to “music,” “music students,” “music lovers,” and the like. The intended meaning is usually clear from context, just as it is when a rock fan refers—without further qualification—to his or her love of “music.””*

Singing and playing art music, and listening to such music being sung and played, were widely regarded in America as activities primarily suited to women and children (especially girls), with the significant exception that only men, generally, were permitted to make music professionally.’ By the early twentieth century, a male musician could moan in embarrassment that “eighty-five per cent of the music students are girls; seventy-five per cent (at least) of the concert audiences are women, and even the promoting and managing of musical enterprises is getting more and more into their hands.’”® But, as Schiff correctly notes, serious studies of female involvement in Western art music have tended to focus on composition, an area of musical activity from which women have until very recently been (and still to some extent are) systematically excluded and discouraged, not least by being denied proper training, performance opportunities, salaried positions, and commissions.

Recent scholarship has succeeded in recovering the works and reexamining the

sometimes conflict-ridden careers of a whole host of able and even remarkable women composers, from Hudegarde von Bingen in medieval Germany and Barbara Strozzi in Renaissance Italy, through Clara Schumann in Romantic-era Germany and Ruth Crawford in mid-twentieth-century America, to such prominent figures of today’s musical life as Russia’s Sofia Gubaidulina and the Pulitzer Prize—winner Ellen ‘Taafe Zwilich. Schiff, although presumably not wishing to minimize such compositional achievements (or the scholarly efforts that have made many of them known), draws attention to three other areas of music in which European and American women have been relatively more active and prominent in the past two centuries, areas that we might call the three f’s: performance, pedagogy, and patronage. The performers, fortunately, are beginning to get their due in the written record (to the extent that they have not taken care of the task themselves, through autobiography), and so is the occasional pedagogue.’ This, oddly, leaves patrons as the least explored category of women participants in Western art music since around 1800.° We say “oddly,” for the woman patron is widely recognized enough to have become the butt of jokes and parodies galore.’ Furthermore, many of the women who were active as patrons—as tulers of musical soil—were not particularly obscure or self-effacing. Some, such as Coolidge and Polignac, even left extensive paper trails, which interested scholars might productively follow. As for those patrons alive and at plow today, many—Betty Freeman, for one—are willing to reflect publicly Gf asked in a congenial spirit) upon their efforts, successes, and disappointments.

Introducton = 3

TOUCHY TOPICS: MONEY AND WOMAN’S ROLE The story, or big parts of it, can be told, as it can be and is now being told also in artistic fields other than music.'° That it has not been told is the result, in part, of twin biases prevailing within the discipline of musicology and, more generally, within Western academic and “high-culture” circles. In the first place, what philosophers might call the “idealist” conception of the work of art leads us to focus primarily on a small number of canonical masterpieces, to view them as, in some degree, transcendent, and to isolate them from the material—human and societal—contexts 1n which they were and are produced and diffused. Secondly, to the extent that we do try to place a given musical work in its social context, a deeply rooted “individualism’”—a belief that artistic creativity 1s primarily a matter of individual gentus—leads us to seek this context within the career and creative output of one person, the composer. A Mozart piano sonata, Mendelssohn’s string octet, Ives’s The Unanswered Question, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s string quartet, Arvo Part’s Fratres—each is viewed mainly or even solely as the man-

ifestation of one individual’s exceptional musical gifts, expressive drive, and personality. Less often, in contrast, are we encouraged to think in some detail about the different ways in which other members of the social body—the professional or amateur performer, the patron, the music educator, the critic, and the audience member or compact-disc purchaser—experience and influence music. All these individuals play essential roles in the musical life of a given place and time, enabling as they do the creation—and the continued, meaningful existence, in performance and in-

terpretation—of those great musical works that we are taught to admire and love. Indeed, they could be said to “make music,” in the sense that they make music possible, whether or not they actually set notes on paper, or strike bow against string.” Why then does the very existence of these various music makers sometimes go unremarked? In the case of the patron, at least, one reason is surely that this music “maker” tends to be a woman. A sadly reliable pair of feminist truisms holds that

any work that is socially undervalued (e.g., childrearing, primary education, housework, patient care) will be assigned to women and that, conversely, any work

that women do will be socially undervalued (scorned, underpaid, taken for granted) and, in the historical record, rendered to some extent invisible. Work in libraries, kitchens, and hospitals tends to garner acclaim, and decent pay, only when carried out by high-ranking men (e.g., famous chefs); music patronage, simularly, gets reported and discussed much more when the patron is a Henry (Lee Higginson), Otto (Kahn), or Paul (Fromm) rather than a Jeannette (Thurber), Elizabeth (Sprague Coolidge), or Minnie (S. Guggenheimer).'* But, even in recent writings sympathetic to the variety of roles that women can play in music, the woman patron is rarely mentioned. Here the explanation may be that the woman patron does not match certain current feminist ideals, based as they are on the (laudable) goal of achieving public recognition and financial and professional parity with men. The Musical Woman, that fascinating, yearbooklike

4 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR compendium of lists and essays documenting women’s work in music (primarily today and in the recent past), has been rightly praised for its “earnest eclecticism,” which one reviewer admitted to finding “moving.”!? Upon closer examination, though, one realizes that the editors of The Musical Woman do not offer all “musical women” an embracing welcome.'* The focus is almost entirely on women who have achieved, or are still striving to achieve, high status and visibility, preferably as full-time professionals: composers, conductors, performers, and college professors. Public-school music teachers do not get much attention in the series, an unfortunate omission. After all, the band, orchestra, Orff-instrument, chorus, and musical-theater programs that these teachers lead provide many Americans with a rare opportunity to be involved in (as children) and to witness (as parents) “live,” participatory music making. In addition, such programs often offer people their only direct contact with even a stripped-down version of the Western art-music repertoire.'° Similarly, these schoolteachers’ “general music” classes offer the only exposure that many will ever get to what is for better or worse called “music appreciation.”!° Even less noted in The Musical Woman are other groups of music teachers: those who earn “part-time” incomes running after-school piano or voice studios in their homes, and those who train vocal and handbell choirs or lead children’s singing groups in churches and synagogues (often for low pay or none at all).'’ As for patrons and other musical activists, there has been little beside an article on Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in the massive first three volumes of The Musical Woman. Coolidge is, of course, safely dead, and in any case, she was clearly a “musical woman,” since she played the piano before audiences and took her composing seriously. One wonders whether we have reached the point where a woman cannot be called “musical” if she has never learned to play an instrument or read a score, however much she may help, say, to keep a chamber-music series afloat, or even to steer its policies and repertoire.'® One way or the other, then, the woman patron of Western art music in Amer-

ica tends to get ignored (or—as we shall repeatedly see—condescended to or smartly reproached)! on account of her gender, whether because she is a woman doing “woman’s work” or because she does not fit the profile of the “new” or professional woman. In most writings on musical life, though, she gets neglected for a reason even simpler and sometimes more powerful than gender: her connection with money. Patronage, whether by women or men, often involves handing over cash to musicians, directly or indirectly, and many people who hold a somewhat

worshipful attitude toward the works of the “classical” canon—an attitude that tends to result from the idealism mentioned earlier—feel that any mention of money distracts (or even detracts) from the cherished qualities of the object of their veneration. What they may not realize (perhaps because the issue is not often raised by music journalists, college music-appreciation teachers, and others in a good position to educate the public) is that any art that is highly professional and technically refined requires a solid financial base and a well-organized system of

Introduction =—s-5

dissemination, whether the artistic “product,” as Schiff calls it, be a concerto, a play, or a book of short stories. Indeed, the way in which a performing art, especially,

is funded affects the repertoire that gets performed and the way that that repertoire is marketed to the public, a point illustrated repeatedly in this book. Exactly how patronage operates is, as has recently been said of American philanthropy generally, difficult to describe, because the interests of the various participating parties and constituencies are so various and their interrelationships at times idiosyncratic.*° But there can be no doubt about the centrality of economic issues to the healthy existence of such institutions as symphony orchestras, opera companies, or professional and community music schools. Many of the women described in the following chapters knew this. ‘They shared today’s veneration of Bach’s or Mozart’s or Wagner’s or Copland’s music, yet they dealt frankly—more frankly, indeed, than scholars have tended to do!—with such hard-nosed financial tasks as improving the composer’s and performer’s earning power or building for the community a well-constructed concert hall with comfortable seats and good acoustics. In any case, money is only one ingredient—and, as our studies show, not always the most important or the hardest to attain—1in the recipe that leads to effective and inspired music patronage. ‘The same can be said of patronage of the other arts, especially modern art and dance.*! (This similarity is not surprising, given that patrons have often been active in several artistic areas; we might mention Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Betty Freeman, both treated in the present book, but also a major male patron, Lincoln Kirstein.)** Precisely because the stigmas of money, privilege, and condescension tend to hang over such words as “patronage” and “patron” (and even more over “patroness”), several of the contributors to this book speak instead, at times, of “musical activism,” by analogy to the social and community activism that has engaged the creative energies of so many American women of means, from Jane Addams of Hull House to Brooke Astor.*’ Money, privilege, and even the snobbishness of certain “patronesses” do play a part in some of the stories we tell, but so do such things as hard work, clear thinking, networking,” self-sacrifice, and a devotion to making life rich in ways that bank accounts may assist but cannot measure.

THE BOUNDARIES OF THIS BOOK The role of patronage in “classical music” (Western art music) 1s a large, unwieldy phenomenon, subject to the diverse encouraging and hindering pressures of place and time, gender and class, race and religion. In the hope of shaping a coherent book, we (the two editors, speaking for ourselves for the next while, rather than for all contributors to the book) made three early decisions to help delimit this vast subject, all apparent in the book’s title and subtitle: (1) it would deal primarily with women rather than men; (2) it would deal (for the most part) with people who volunteered their time, efforts, and funds, rather than with professional musicians, administrators, and the like; and (3) it would focus on the American scene rather than try to deal with several different countries.

6 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR The first two of these self-imposed restrictions are closely intertwined and need to be discussed together, at some length. (The restriction to America will be treated afterward.) We chose to focus not just on women but on women fatrons (and women volunteers), in large part because we wished to help redress two striking imbalances in the historical record (taken in its widest sense to include newspaper accounts and the like). ‘The first smbalance derives from the professional/amateur dichotomy that structures cultural and artistic life in the modern age. Certain of the professional musicians and impresarios who, in the course of their (sometimes well-paid) careers, built or sustained the nation’s leading musical institutions have had their story told, or have told it themselves, admittedly in versions that are often highly selective or one-sided. (he list includes, among others, ‘Theodore ‘Thomas, Oscar Hammerstein I [father of the Broadway lyricist], the Damrosch dynasty, Olga Samaroff,

Arthur Judson, Sol Hurok, Rudolph Bing, Sarah Caldwell, and Gian Carlo Menotti.) We have, though, encouraged the authors to blur the line between the amateur and what we might call the “low-status professional’”—for example, the highschool music teacher or community choral director—if that might prove helpful (especially in Chapter 7). Certain of the authors also problematize the very dichotomy between the two terms “amateur” and “professional,” as in Chapters 9 and 10.

The second imbalance in the historical record that distressed us seems rooted even more explicitly in gender. The story of the male patron, we noted earlier, has often been told to the exclusion of that of his female equivalent. As with the professional musicians Just mentioned, this does not mean that all has been said. Male patrons clearly deserve further study: surely there were complex gender implications in a man’s involving himself—especially not for pay—in a cultural activity then regarded as highly feminine.*® The present book may help point in that direction by evoking at times, mainly for comparison or contrast, the work of Higginson and other male activists in music, and by giving at least glancing attention to a few supportive husbands. ‘These include Henry Drinker, who was himself—as appears in Chapter 9 and Vignette J—a capable and scholarly musician unrestrainedly devoted to cultivating performance in the home. (On the interchapter vignettes, generally, see the section below on our book’s structure.) Indeed, we might note that the social history of the arts provides striking support for the recent contention of Joan Wallach Scott and others that sumple claims of male and female “cultures” or “spheres of activity” must give way to more complex explorations of gender as the site of ongoing contestation and resistance.*° This book, in short, aims to take women patrons seriously both as women and as patrons. In order to give the book some chance at depth, we (the editors) added a third restriction, as noted above: it would deal only with women patrons in the United States. Patrons who were active in other countries are therefore not discussed, not even the remarkably influential one whom David Schiff mentions in the passage quoted earlier: Princess Edmond de Polignac, née Winaretta Singer, who, although heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, was raised in Paris and

Introduction 7 functioned as patron almost entirely in that city.?’ But Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Betty Freeman, both of whom Schiff mentions, are treated here (in their own words even), as are many other influential and distinctive American patrons, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, Jeannette Thurber, Harriet Gibbs Marshall, Sophie Drinker, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Clare Reis. Some are portrayed in detail; others are discussed or quoted more briefly as instances of larger trends. But each amply deserves the scholarly attention that she receives here. Still others, we should stress, could easily have been included, such as Eleanor

Robson (Mrs. August) Belmont, who founded the Metropolitan Opera Gud, Elise Boyer Hall (of Boston), who commissioned works for saxophone from Debussy and others, the Nebraska-born Gertrude Clark Whittall, who contributed five Stradivarius instruments to the Library of Congress and endowed the concert series in which they have been used ever since, Mary Louise Curtis Bok (who founded the Curtis Institute), Ima Hogg (who spearheaded the founding of the Houston Symphony and served as president of the board of trustees for twelve years), Marjorie Merriweather Post (who gave more than a million dollars to the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.), Louise M. Davies (who gave $5 million toward the construction of the hall the San Francisco Symphony plays in and another $3 million to the orchestra’s endowment fund), Catherine Filene Shouse (the founder of the Wolf ‘Trap national park and summer festival), Alice Tully (of New York), or the less well-known women in cities across the country (e.g., Minneapolis) whose work is only now being uncovered.”° And another book entirely could be devoted to the women who did much to foster ballet and modern dance in the United States, whether through direct creative involvement (notably as choreographers and leading dancers), public lecturing, financial contributions (or personal

and financial sacrifices), organizational work, or some combination of these. There is a major musical component to the story of dance in the United States: companies such as Martha Graham’s, Laura Dean’s, and Ballet Theatre (directed by Lucia Chase) have provided a base of operations and source of commissions for American composers (whether native or foreign-born) in the early stages of their careers, such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Halim El-Dabh, and, more recently, Steve Reich. In deciding whom to include in our book, we were, to some extent, drawn to women for whom documentary evidence was plentiful or accessible. But we were also guided by the desire to present as diverse and representative a panorama as possible within the limitations we had set ourselves: Coolidge can to some extent stand for Whittall, despite the striking differences that observers such as Joseph Kerman have noted between their approaches to the support of chamber music.*”

In addition, we felt that the book might reveal more about the problem of women’s patronage if it sacrificed comprehensiveness and examined a relatively small number of cases in greater depth. Nonetheless, Chapters 1, 2 and 10, especially, and those documentary “vignettes” that present women not treated in the

8 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR chapters proper, may nonetheless help suggest how widespread and energetic the phenomenon of women’s patronage in music was and 1s. NAMING HER: “PATRON,” “ACTIVIST,” “VOLUNTEER WORKER”? No one term suffices to describe all the women to be discussed in this book, and no available term, whether or not traditionally used by the women themselves, is free

of evaluative connotations. “Patron” and “patroness” were once honorifics: Baroque-era musicians, in their dedicatory prefaces, often placed the patron just above the creative artist and just below Orpheus and the muses.°? Today, in contrast, the terms often carry echoes of excessive privilege (not to speak of the awkwardness of referring to women by a term deriving from faier). Still, the editors and the contributors do not hesitate to use “patron” (although rarely “patroness”’). “Activist” is the editors’ current favorite; this book may be among the first to use it regularly in a musical context. “Volunteer” or “volunteer worker” is more often heard in regard to music, but it does not seem broad enough to include women who made primarily monetary contributions. Like “activist,” though, it has the advantage of emphasizing a woman’s agency—ain this case, work done of her own free will, voluntas. It also helpfully suggests a link between women’s work on behalf of music, on

the one hand, and volunteer work in other areas, including what is sometimes called “social feminism”: women organizing, without pay, to cure the ills of society, save the “fallen,” comfort the poor, and so on.*! Lori D. Ginzberg nicely incorporates the word “work” into the title of her recent book on such organizations of un-

paid “social housekeepers” (as they were also sometimes known) in the United States: Women and the Work of Benevolence.** Seen this way, volunteering in music often

amounts to unpaid labor—ranging from clerical to fully managerial and executive—in such fields as arts administration, marketing, and public relations. But the word “volunteer” also carries a taint. “Volunteering was [and is] hardly

a daring choice for modern American women,” states Wendy Kaminer in her thoughtful book on the whole range of unpaid women workers (ranging from “candy stripers” in hospitals to antiwar activists).°° In the musical arena, too, volunteer work is sometimes viewed as too easy a compromise with the patriarchal system, in that it gives a woman an outlet for her energies and talents but without, as feminist critics rightly stress, granting her the legal and financial benefits, and the “strong, new, autonomous identity” (as Kaminer puts it) of a real, paying job, and of course also without the attendant risks and pressures that come with seeking and holding that job.°* When one thinks about it, though, this argument 1s odd, or at least rather onesided (as Kaminer implies elsewhere in her book). Is it less courageous to con-

tribute one’s time and money than to be paid, as a modern arts administrator would be, to do the same kind of work? Surely these are just two different ways—

and not the only two—of mobilizing societal energies for a project of some

Introduction 9 difficulty and importance. Music is, after all, not unique: whole sectors of Ameri-

can society rely on volunteer workers—many of them (and in some situations most or all of them) women—f they are to function well, or function at all: one thinks of town councils and homeless shelters; libraries, literacy volunteers, and public schools; hospitals, blood-donor programs, hospices, suicide hotlines, and AIDS counseling centers; and scouting organizations, places of worship, political parties, and the whole range of issue-oriented activist organizations.*° There are even mayors of decent-sized cities (such as Portland, Maine) who receive no pay or a minimal honorarium, and many of these, too, are women. Much important work goes unremunerated, but as an aged alumna at a Smith College reunion noted, “Someone has to do it.”*° And, given that U.S. government, at its various levels, has been relatively unsupportive of the arts (in contrast, especially, to the levels of support in Europe), that “someone” who “has to do” the job will as often as not have to be a volunteer, and more often than not 1s a woman.

The editors, it should be stressed, do not pretend to be pleased with this arrangement. But this book is primarily about real life; it is not, except at certain explicit moments or, more often, between the lines, about the various contributors’ visions of how life—and musical life—ideally should be arranged. (An exception to this rule is the sustainedly interpretive concluding chapter, written by one of the editors alone.)

THE GENDERED DISTORTIONS OF HISTORY The present book, as we have already suggested, presents an argument, and evidence for that argument. It focuses on middle- and upper-class women patrons in order to demonstrate that they, taken together, formed and still form the predominant population of activists for and organizers of concert music and opera in the United States. We say this in full realization that individual men of means, such as Otto Kahn, have given millions to institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera. But, for a century now, American women have outnumbered men in music patronage ten or a hundred times over.’’ Since most of them were and are less wealthy than Kahn was, they have tended to achieve results that are quite different from those associated with male patrons, or at least they have, in working toward similar goals to those of the men, developed distinctive working patterns, notably (as we shall see over and over) more collective ones.** This, we quickly point out, is not to deny the diversity of patronage styles among women: for example, individual women of great wealth tended to go it alone (like their male equivalents) as patrons; and music-loving African-American women focused their energies on creat-

ing institutional structures that responded to the distinct needs and tapped the resources (e.g., the churches) of the African-American community (see Chapter 7).

The varied stories told here, and the many other stories that they, for lack of space, must “stand for,’ constitute a sturdy structural cord in the tapestry of

10 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR American music history. We say “cord,” because this work was to a large extent in-

tended to remain invisible, a support for the artistic work on the surface. Stull, structural support needs to be recognized, if only in the scholarly literature. And yet, women’s patronage has, until recently, gone nearly unmentioned in most standard texts and reference works, and its nature and extent have been insufficiently explored, much less thoughtfully theorized. ‘This “distortion of omission” (as we might call it) concerning women patrons disfigures several of the otherwise most reliable histories of American music; it is even apparent, although to a lesser extent, in that model of scholarly thoroughness and insight, the recent New Grove Ductionary of American Music? Earlier we noted that scholars are generally hesitant to deal frankly with questions of money; as Richard Crawford puts it, the large topics of “institutions and economic arrangements” in American music “have been left in the dark by musicologists.”*° But women patrons have been more consistently ignored, for reasons suggested earlier; and in the case of patrons who are

both women and African-Americans the distortion of omission has been compounded by most musicologists’ lack of familiarity with such basic historical sources as African-American newspapers. The distortion of omission is one way in which those who construct the historical record silence or erase, however inadvertently or unconsciously, what does not fit the prevailing paradigm or myth—namely, here, male domination of the “creative” realm of human activity. Indeed, we might note that this myth 1s particularly misleading in regard to the place of the arts (including music) in American society, given that the arts—love of them, skill in them, except when carried out as a profession—were long assigned to the woman’s realm and therefore prized as, precisely, feminine accomplishments. ‘here is another way in which evidence that does not neatly fit a paradigm gets silenced or erased; we might call this the “distortion of substitution.” Pamela J. Perry, in a recent dissertation on music in Connecticut, has detailed several major

cases in which “men were credited [in newspapers and books] with progress or success actually resulting from the initiative and benefaction” of their wives and other women, thereby polluting the historical record (although, thanks to Perry’s efforts, not irreversibly); a recent study by Catherine Parsons Smith similarly demonstrates that the early stages of the founding of the Hollywood Bowl, shaped mainly by women, have been systematically disregarded by chroniclers and historians in favor of the later ones, in which men took over the lead.*! The lack of easily available and reliable information about patronage of music and art shows in writings of more general import. Biographers and scholars have often failed to reconstruct in its full richness and contradictions the life of the early-twentieth-century middle- and upper-class woman; for to leave out, or pass over quickly as inessential, the art on her walls and the concerts she mounted at home (or helped establish in larger and more public venues) is to veil from sight the

activities and engagements through which she often assumed her most nondomestic, most publicly influential Gf not always publicly acknowledged) role. The

Introduction = 11

developments reported and studied here will thus need to find their rightful place not only in music history, as noted earlier, but also in the larger tapestries of American social and cultural history and American women’s history.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK: TRENDS, INDIVIDUALS, AND DOCUMENTARY “VIGNETTES” The essays in this collection, we have said, cannot pretend to offer a fully comprehensive study of the topic. ‘Taken together, though, they treat it in a manner that, the editors hope, 1s representative, intellectually challenging, and well grounded historically and theoretically. Five chapters study groups and trends (Chapters 1 and 10, which both offer broad overviews, although of different kinds, plus Chapters 2, 5, and 7), four chapters examine in closer detail the patronage work of a particularly active individual woman (Chapters 3, 4, 6, 9), and one (Chapter 8) falls somewhere between the two types, in that it discusses four individuals in moderate detail. Among the major developments studied in one or more of the “trends” chapters are the concert-sponsoring activities of women’s music clubs and women impresarios (Chapters 2 and 7) and women’s founding and support of symphony or-

chestras (Chapters 2 and 5). Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 10 (as well as several of the documentary vignettes) shed some light on the phenomenon—often seen, even today, as surprising, paradoxical, or ludicrous—of wealthy women supporting composers of challenging and often-dissonant “modern music,” whether “modern” would, depending on the period in question, have been taken to mean Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy (around 1900), Bart6k and Henry Cowell (in the 1920s), or Mel Powell and John Adams (in our own day). That the names just mentioned are all male is not accidental: the frequent (although not total) lack of support for women composers by female (and of course by male) patrons throughout the period under study will also be addressed at several points, as will public reactions to and images of women’s musical activism (beyond the “modern music” issue just noted). In addition, various of the essays illustrate how women’s musical patronage meshes with, or contradicts, the broad explanatory schemes of such cultural and social historians and sociologists as Ann Douglas, Paul DiMaggio, Kathleen D. McCarthy, Lawrence W. Levine, and Anne Firor Scott. The four “individuals” treated at length are Isabella Stewart Gardner, the art collector whose Boston home, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, once

contained a high-ceilinged concert hall that could seat three hundred listeners (Chapter 3);** Jeannette Thurber, the woman who brought Antonin Dvorak to America to head the National Conservatory (Chapter 4); Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the pianist, composer, and patron who endowed the Coolidge Foundation, donated the Coolidge Auditorium to the Library of Congress, and commissiloned many works from important composers such as Bart6ék, Copland, and Stravinsky (Chapter 6); and Sophie Drinker, the author of Music and Women (1948),

whose organizational activities in music reflected her strongly held views about

12 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR women’s special gift for musical self-expression and women’s rights generally (which mingled oddly—or perhaps not so oddly, after all—with her general political and cultural conservatism: see Chapter 9).

Throughout the book there will be, by intention, much overlap between “trends” and “individuals”: the trend chapters, being based largely on documentary evidence, regularly mention the contributions of various individuals; and the four individuals chosen for chapter-length discussion represent important larger developments, including some not discussed in the more broadly focused chapters. In addition, several larger issues are raised repeatedly throughout the book, although they are not highlighted in any one chapter: 1. Conflicting and changing attitudes toward the proper spheres of activity for middle- and upper-class women and men (including, for women, certain alternatives to—or extensions of—domesticity, such as voluntarism and “social feminism”). 2. ‘The intertwined factors of social class, race, ethnicity, and geographical location (east/west, town/city). 3. Aspecific aspect of point (2): the wide range of ideological and political investments that could motivate music patronage, including various forms of patriotism and nationalism (especially in wartime), but also (near the left end of the political spectrum) the Progressive-inspired desire to educate and

empower immigrants and working people, and (at the opposite end) the arch-conservative program of constructing highly elitist and socially (racially, religiously) exclusive cultural institutions, such as the nation’s opera houses around 1900.

4. The tendency of “serious” American music lovers to devote their energies to dissemination of the canonical works of European musical culture and to resist American music (including much American “art” music but also vernacular genres such as musical comedy, spirituals, and jazz). 5. Ihe functions that musical patronage has fulfilled in women’s lives, including the ways in which it has been altered by society’s increasing willingness, especially in recent decades, to permit women to study music in all its aspects, perform publicly, and pursue the full range of professional careers in music.

The book’s conclusion (Chapter 10) is devoted to a more thoroughgoing and frankly personal discussion, by one of the editors, of certain issues broached earlier, especially in the present Introduction and in Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 9. Some recent scholarly discussions of the “sacralization” of music in turn-of-the-century America, and the role played by patrons (whether male or female) in that process, are challenged, as are various widespread prejudices and misconceptions about the phenomenon of the woman patron of music. Recent changes in patterns of patronage, finally, are briefly addressed, especially those relating to the new conditions of musical life that have arisen with the growth of the electronic media.

Introduction 13 As interludelike vignettes between the chapters, we include some particularly revealing (and annotated) unpublished or “lost” documents that provide a direct glimpse into various aspects of musical life and patronage. Each vignette that directly follows a chapter (i.e., Vignettes C, D, G, I, and J) relates to that chapter. When two or more vignettes are grouped together, the second or later ones serve as “further cases,” often introducing patrons whose work illustrates some aspect not otherwise discussed, or treated only briefly, elsewhere in the book. Vignettes A and B are rather special, in that they together “frame” the time period to be covered in the book—from the 1860s or even, briefly, the 1830s up to the present day—and together hint at the variety of women’s ways of working for music in America. Finally, many of the vignettes have the added advantage of allowing the voice of a given patron (whether or not she also has her own chapter) to be heard with relatively little editorial mediation. The book is organized in roughly chronological sequence, although the chronology is tempered by certain connections of subject matter and complicated by the long life span and continuing patronage of some of the patrons here discussed, such as Coolidge. (Whether patrons are referred to as “Mrs.” or by last or first or full name has been left to the discretion of the individual contributors.)** In any case, we as editors have tried to make sure that each chapter can stand independently of the others. We look forward to this book being used by readers who may come from women’s history, American studies, or other fields outside of music. Throughout the book, all of the authors, even in the chapters concerned with larger trends, have, with our encouragement, anchored the discussion by referring to specific cases and archival documents. Many previously unpublished or nearly inaccessible sources of information have been consulted (e.g., letters, diaries, local newspapers), greatly reducing the need to rely on hoary generalizations or impressionistic observations. At the same time, though, we (the editors) do not advocate holding back from the task of interpreting the phenomena here uncovered. ‘To begin with, the very process of selecting, summarizing, and arranging histor1cal data is inevitably guided by the scholar’s particular aims and by the audience being addressed. Beyond that, though, a study of this sort calls for the scholar, or so it seems to us, to enter imaginatively into the lives of the historical actors under discussion. ‘This should not imply some sort of sentimental fusion between past (however distant or recent) and present, between historical “material” and histo-

rian; rather, it requires a perpetual and, we hope, creative tension—a constant corrective interplay—between evidence and interpretation. Our authors here face and also sometimes explicitly address the challenge of striking a dynamic balance—again, one must not imagine finding the perfect, static middle point—between, on the one hand, doing justice to the ways that women’s work in music was

perceived by the women themselves and their contemporaries and, on the other hand, submitting such testimonies to a more searching critique informed by, say, feminist and cultural theory (enriched, at times, by commonsense insight into basic human motivation and group dynamics). In particular, we feel, the historian

14 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR (and, in turn, the reader) should be wary of various stereotypical and demonstrably inadequate ways of depicting the woman patron: for example, as a selfless heroine battling overwhelming odds, or (the polar opposite) as a silly, overprivileged dabbler. ‘This problem of “reading” the patron will, as noted earlier, receive fuller discussion in Chapters 1, 2, 5, 9, and ro.

A RESEMBLING PORTRAIT? What, one might well ask, would the patrons and activists themselves say (or have said) about the stories that we (the various authors) have constructed in this book? That, alas, is something we for the most part cannot know. But we have tried to let their own voices be heard more or less unmediated at various points in the chapters and, of course, in the vignettes, always remembering, though, that, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun puts it, women’s writings (and interviews) about their own lives are often constrained by “the bonds of womanly attitudes.”“* But then, there is also no saying that these women’s perceptions—even if we could know them in their fullness—ought to outweigh the views presented by the

authors here. When Virgil Thomson composed a sonata-portrait of Peggy Guggenheim, she found it “not in the least resembling,” yet the possibility exists that Thomson saw something in her as she sat before him in a chair (his usual way of doing a person’s musical portrait)—reading, as it happens, his perceptive little sociological essay The State of Music—that simply differed from the image of herself that she preferred to project. ‘Thomson knew and appreciated the contributions that women of means could make to the arts and not least to music. A large number of his 147 musical “portraits” of friends and associates are of women who were patrons, arts organizers, hostesses, or wives of gallery owners, although his verbal descriptions of the sitters (when they exist) make it difficult to know where

to draw the line between a rich person who was broadly active in the arts community and one to whom he was personally indebted (and perhaps wished to become more so). The varied list includes Betty Freeman (interviewed in our Vi1-

enette B), Mary Reynolds (“from Minneapolis, friend of artists, and a bookbinder”), Helen Austin (“a gracious presence in Hartford all her life’), Gyn-

thia Kemper (president of the Performing Arts Foundation of Kansas City), Louise Crane (heiress of the Crane paper company and organizer of concerts at the Museum of Modern Art), Constance Askew (patron of artists and writers), and Mrs. Chester Whitin Lasell (Thomson’s patron in his early years). ‘Uhomson’s highly individual little pieces seek to capture the particular profile and force—the elegance, determination, “rock-bound” stolidity, or impulsive busyness—that he saw or intuited in each individual woman (or man, for many of Thomson’s portraits depict male friends and associates). The prose portraits, documents, and photos offered in this book represent a simular attempt to evoke a complex living reality: the richly involving, deeply com-

Introduction 15 promised, still (to many of us) admirable and much-needed efforts of women— and men—to promote and foster musical art in America.

Before launching readers into the various detailed studies of individual women and groups of women that make up the core of the book, the editors felt that some readers might find it helpful if the two of us laid out a factual and interpretive framework for dealing with (women’s) patronage of art music in America. Our Chapter 1 thus examines, with a wide-angle lens, this rather puzzling American phenomenon: the largely voluntary building up of a demand for, and a means of supplying, a complex and costly, prestigious, “labor-intensive” performing art in a new and cumbersomely large nation. What were—and are, for the phenomenon continues—the (constraining? empowering?) contexts—musical, financial, social, cultural-ideological, psychological—within which art-music activists, especially female ones, devoted, and still devote, time, energy, and money to such a cause?

NOTES Some of the material written by Ralph P. Locke in this Introduction first appeared in an earlier form in his overview article, “Paradoxes of the Woman Music Patron in America,” Musial Quarterly 78 (1994): 798-825. Some of the issues raised here are explored further in his “Women in American Musical Life: Facts and Questions about Patronage,” repercussions 3, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 81-95, and 4, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 102. Besides the people thanked in the Acknowledgments, the authors would like to thank Philip Carli, Jean Pedersen, and Joan Shelley Rubin for pointing us to unsuspected sources or suggesting interpretive possibilities.

1. David Schiff, “The Bounds of Music: The Strange New Direction of Musical Criticism,” New Republic, 3 February 1992, 32-37. 2. See Women in Music, ed. Carol Neuls-Bates (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Women Making Music, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Ellen Koskoff (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987); Marcia Citron’s wide-ranging Gender and the Musical Canon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1991) and the rich bibliography therein; and the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel (New York: Norton, 1994). A recent overview of the literature on women and music is Susan CG. Cook and Judy S. ‘Isou, “Introduction: “Bright Cecilia’,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Musvc,

ed. Cook and ‘Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 1-14. See also Margaret Ericson, Women and Music: A Selective Annotated Bibliography on Women and Gender Issues in Music

(New York: G. K. Hall, 1996). 3. Jazz, for example, shows—especially in recent decades—many of the features of an

almost recherché “high-art” tradition, in the sociologist’s sense of the term; rock music is performed in concert and is often, in its own way, serious; and many Broadway musicals

16 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR and Hollywood movies rely on fully notated and orchestrated scores no less than do operas and oratorios. 4. For further discussion of the terminological issue (and some arguments in defense of the term “Western art music”), see the first half of Chapter 10 below, or the fuller version: Ralph P. Locke, “Music Lovers, Patrons, and the ‘Sacralization’ of American Culture,” Nineteenth-Century Music 17 (1993-94): 149-73, and 18 (1994-95): 83-84. Richard Crawford has recently offered a new dichotomy: Beethoven’s symphonies are a “composer’s music” as opposed to various types of “performer’s music,” such as jazz. See his The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 41-107, 250-303. 5. See excerpts from etiquette manuals, in Elizabeth Aldrich, From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991),

125-28; see also two articles by Julia Eklund Koza: “Music Instruction in the Nineteenth Century: Views from Godey’s Lady Book, 1830-77,” journal of Research in Music Education 38

(1990): 245-57, and “Music and the Feminine Sphere: Images of Women as Musicians in Godey’s Lady Book, 1830~—77,” Musical Quarterly 75 (1991): 103-29. The evidence gathered and sorted by Aldrich and Koza—and by Judith Tick in her magisterial American Women Composers

before 1870 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983), reprint, with a new preface by Ruth A. Solie (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996)—serves to reinforce the basic arguments of Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), a book that focuses almost entirely on literary evidence (including sermons). Further

on American women and “art” music, see chapters by Adrienne Fried Block and by J. Michele Edwards in Women and Music, ed. Pendle, 142-72 and 211-57 (additional chapters treat American women working in popular music and jazz), and by Block and by Bonny H. Miller in Ceczlia Reclaimed, ed. Cook and Tsou, 107-33 and 156-82. Basic to any research on these topics are Donald W. Krummel, Jean Geil, Doris J. Dyen, and Deane L. Root, Resources of Amencan Music History: A Directory of Source Matenals from Colonial Times to World War I (Urbana: University of Llinois Press, 1981); Women in Amencan Music: A Bibliography of Music and Lit-

erature, ed. Adrienne Fried Block and Carol Neuls-Bates (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1986); and the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers.

6. Harold T. Randolph, “The Feminization of Music,” Music Teachers National Association Proceedings, 17th ser. (1922): 194-200, quoted in Catherine Parsons Smith, “‘A Distinguishing Virility’: On Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Ceczla Reclaimed, ed. Cook and ‘Isou, go—-106. Among other distressed male musicians was the critic-composer Deems ‘Taylor (best known today for his later role as the narrator in Walt Disney’s Fantasia): “this well-nigh complete feminization of music is bad for it. . . [and] aggravates our already exaggerated tendency to demand that art be edifying” (quoted by Smith, from ‘Taylor’s article “Music,” in Crveltzation in the United States, ed. Harold Stearns [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922], 211). 7, Among twentieth-century performers, singers often have written memorrs, e.g., Nel-

lie Melba and Beverly Sills, and recent years have seen fine, detailed books published on Callas’s recorded legacy and on the violinist Maud Powell. No fewer than three excellent books are now available on the pedagogue and conductor Nadia Boulanger. Performers in the nineteenth century were also often composers (and were often pedagogues, too). See Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); also other studies cited in Reich’s “European Composers and Musicians, ca.

Introduction 17 1800-1890” and in Marcia J. Citron, “European Composers and Musicians, 1880-1918,” both of which are chapters in Women and Music, ed. Pendle, 97-122 and 123-72. Oddly, the twentieth-century chapters in Pendle’s book (except those on popular music) focus almost exclusively on composers; the net result is that the book leaves unmentioned some of the most prominent, influential, and (to some extent) well-paid musicians, including worldrenowned instrumentalists (e.g, Myra Hess, Clara Haskil, Marie-Claire Alain, women in string quartets) and opera singers (Callas, Marian Anderson, Kirsten Flagstad, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne). On the

omission of teachers and patrons, see n. 18. |

8. Lubov Keefer’s Music Angels: A Thousand Years of Patronage (Baltimore: Sutherland Press, 1976) is engaging but uncritical and error-ridden. (American patrons of dance, symphony, and the like are discussed on pp. 157-84. ‘he earlier chapters owe much to standard reference works and perhaps also to Sophie Drinker’s idiosyncratic but insightful Music and Women, a work discussed in Chapter 9 below.) Much shorter but more reliable (and carefully

documented) is Linda Whitesitt, “Women’s Support and Encouragement of Music and Musicians,” in Women and Music, ed. Pendle, 301-13. The brief attention given various patrons of turn-of-the-century American composers in Nicholas E. ‘Tawa’s The Coming of Age of American Art Music: New England’s Classical Romanticists (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991),

esp. 17-19, 35-37, 1s a step in the right direction; see also Victor Fell Yellin’s review in Music Library Association Notes 48 (1991-92): 1237-41.

g. Several of these, including one by Marc Blitzstein, are discussed in Chapter 8, and several more (by Sinclair Lewis et al.) are mentioned in Chapter to. Samuel R. Rosenbaum, an important figure in classical-music life in the 1950s and 1960s, shared with his readers a “popular anecdote” (1.e., a supposed rib-tickler) to the effect that in America the love affair between a musician and a wealthy woman results not in a baby (as would be the case in Ku-

rope) but in a new symphony orchestra (“Financial Evolution of the Orchestra,” in The Amencan Symphony Orchestra, ed. Henry Swoboda [ New York: Basic Books, 1967], 172).

10. The tendency of scholars to ignore, at least until very recently, unpaid “cultural work” in music (and also ill-paid work within the music profession, such as that of the private piano teacher, referred to in a later paragraph) is apparent at a glance in “An Annotated Bibliography of Recent Writings on Women in Music,” compiled by Nancy Reich and others for Women’s Studies / Women’s Status, CMS Report 5 (Boulder, Colo.: College Music Society, 1988), 3-77. Some valuable work on music patronage through the ages (in Europe and America) 1s summarized in Whitesitt, “Women’s Support.” A fascinating collection of studies on patronage in and outside of music, in different times and places, 1s Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed. Judith Huggins Balfe (Urbana: Uni-

versity of Illinois Press, 1993). Private arts patronage of course overlaps with several other topics that are receiving increasing attention from social scientists, notably the function of private foundations and the overall problem of arts funding (private, corporate, foundations, and government). See Dick Netzer’s classic study, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States (Gambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), as well as several

more recent sources: James Heilbrun and Charles M. Grey, The Economics of Art and Culture: An American Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); America’s Wealthy and

the Future of Foundations, ed. ‘Teresa Odendahl ([ New Haven?]: Foundation Center and Council on Foundations, 1987); The Costs of Culture: Patterns and Prospects of Private Arts Patron-

age, ed. Margaret Jane Wyszomirski and Pat Clubb (New York: American Council for the

18 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR Arts, 1989); Who's to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Arts Support, ed. Mul-

ton C. Cummings, Jr, and J. Mark Davidson Schuster (New York: American Council for the Arts, 1989); and The Arts in the World Economy: Public Policy and Private Philanthropy for a

Global Cultural Community, ed. Olin Robison, Robert Freeman, and Charles A. Riley II (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994). On women’s art clubs, see n. 38 (studies by McCarthy and by Blair). 11. See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Individualism in Western Art Music and Its Cultural Costs,” in her Developing Vanations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 239-64. An analogy may be seen in the area of social policy: ever since the Civil War, union leaders, veterans’ groups, and women’s voluntary organizations, although they take no part in the state apparatus, have helped shape—e., have to some extent driven or “made”—+federal programs, for example by pressing the government to establish pensions for soldiers and their widows—see ‘Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Polktical Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1992). In this book, Skocpol moves from the “state-centered” model of her earlier writings to a “polity-centered” model, as Alan Brinkley notes in his review (New York Review of Books, 26 May 1994, 40); should we, then, be speaking of music’s “polity”—its whole network of interested and influence-wielding parties? 12. Higginson’s letters were published a year after his death, and Kahn’s story has been often and well told in numerous histories of the Met, as well as in Mary Jane Matz, The Many Lives of Otto Kahn (New York: Pendragon Press, 1984) and John Kobler, Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn (New York: Scribner, 1988). Paul Fromm?’s activities have long been chronicled by himself and others (see, notably, A Lefe for New Music: Selected Papers of Paul Fromm, ed. David Gable and Christoph Wolff [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-

sity Department of Music, 1988]). A not atypical example of how this gender imbalance in the historical record filters down is Milton Goldin’s The Music Merchants ({ New York?]: Macmillan, 1969), which divides the history of America’s musical institutions into three ages, those of impresarios (e.g., soprano Jenny Lind’s tours in the nineteenth century), patrons (who established the big orchestras and opera companies), and organizers (of such modern institutions as New York’s Lincoln Center, or the National Endowment for the Arts). The patron is represented by two institutions, the Boston Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera; the former was founded and funded by a single man (Higginson), but here the Met, too, becomes the story of one male individual’s (Kahn’s) devotion, although the institution’s continuing strength throughout the century can hardly be discussed meaningfully without reference to Mrs. August Belmont and the women of the Met Guild. 13. Judith Tick, review of The Musical Woman, vol. 2, Amencan Music 8 (1990): 238. 14. Lhe Muswal Woman: An International Perspective, 3 vols. to date (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984-).

15. Organized music making in America today includes such things as group singing in scouts and teen clubs, hymn singing in places of worship, amateur and student choruses (including doo-wop and vocal jazz ensembles), gospel choirs, barbershop-type groups (e.g., Sweet Adelines), musical comedies in colleges and elsewhere, town bands, community orchestras, and amateur rock or country bands. ‘This is not an insignificant list of activities, but it still involves as participants a small percentage of the adult population; a far greater number, one suspects, neither play an instrument nor lift their voices in song in the presence

Introduction 19 of another person, except on a few social occasions (lullabies, Christmas carols, karaoke and “Happy Birthday” at parties). And, of course, few of the activities listed in this note involve Western art music. 16. School music programs, it is often said, may do more harm than good. But that is surely no reason to ignore them. Quite the contrary, we need to be better informed about the work that those who run such programs do, the circumstances in which they labor, and—to the extent that school music programs ave detrimental—what we might do to renovate them. 17. An article in the third volume of The Musical Woman does treat public-school music. Consistent with the emphasis in the series, it focuses on the increasing presence of music by women composers (e.g., Lili Boulanger, sister of Nadia) in the schools, rather than on the women teachers themselves and their efforts and struggles, much less the parents (largely female) who fight for funding (or, in certain towns, increasingly, raise the funds themselves) to keep the music programs alive. 18. Similarly, but more explicitly, patrons, music therapists, and women active in music education, administration, publishing, and recording are excluded from J. Michele Edwards’s chapter “North America since 1920” in Women and Music, ed. Pendle, 211-57; the reason given is that “additional research” is needed (p. 253). But at least their existence is noted, as it is not in analogous chapters on Britain and Europe. 1g. As the cultural historian George Martin has bluntly noted, “Some men like to mock the women’s committees [of the orchestras, opera companies, and choral societies]. ‘These men are fools. In the United States the role of women in the support and spread of music has been vital” (George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music | Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1983], 135; and see detailed documentation on p. 455, n. 26). 20. Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 38-89. 21. See Nicholas Fox Weber’s delightful, perceptive Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943 (New York: Knopf, 1992): “this book is about believers” (p. 363).

22. Weber (Patron Saints) discusses Lincoln Kirstem and Edward Warburg’s work for modern (visual) art but also, in some detail, their building of modern ballet in America (with Balanchine, Stravinsky, and others); he also explores at length A. Everett Austin’s funding of the premiere of Virgil Thomson’s widely heralded “Negro” opera Four Saints in Three Acts (to a text by Gertrude Stein). See also (on Kirstein and other German-Jewish and WASP members of “Uptown Bohemia”) ‘Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), 324-41.

23. Brooke Astor’s campaign for Manhattan neighborhoods was explored in the New York Limes Magazine, 17 November 1991, 40-43, 68, 72. Hull House even had its music and theater activities: see Hilda Satt Polacheck, / Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, ed. Dena J. Polacheck Epstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), e.g., 80, 105, 107, 109-25.

24. Under “networking” we would also include recognizing the obligations that come with one’s privileged position. The first symphonic broadcasts of a major orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, took place in 1922 when Ira Hirschmann proposed to Felix Fuld, his boss at the department store L. Bamberger & Co. (which owned and operated station WOR) that $15,000 a season was a small cost for the good publicity it would generate. Fuld rejected it as “a damn fool idea,” but Mrs. Fuld, having learned of the plan from her husband, phoned Hirschmann the next morning and told him to go ahead. “She ended the conversation with the admonition, ‘Remember this, young man, men have no imagina-

20 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR tion.’” Part of what may have convinced Mrs. Fuld was her husband’s report that a dozen young female members of the clerical staff had told Fuld that they would indeed listen to such broadcasts (Hirschmann, Oblgato: Untold Tales from a Life with Music [ New York: Fromm

International, 1994], 6-7). 25. See Judith Tick, “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology,” in Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 83-106. 26. Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50, esp. 40-41,

regarding Carol Gilligan. At the same time, though, we hope that the term “women’s sphere” does not come to be rejected outright by scholars. Given that it clearly reflected, and reflects, many people’s experience of social reality, it seems to us a “trope”—the term is Linda K. Kerber’s—that may still be helpful. (Kerber, in contrast, goes on to argue that this trope’s day is past: “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 [1988]: 9-39, quotation from p. 39.) Jane Rendall explores alternatives to the “sphere” metaphor but then admits that it is particularly well suited to (and was indeed used by) middle-class people in nineteenth-century Eu-

rope and the United States (“Nineteenth-Century Feminism and the Separation of Spheres: Reflections on the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Moving On: New Perspectives on the Women’s Movement, ed. ‘Tayo Andreasen, Anette Borchorst, Drude Dahlerup, Eva Lous, and

Hanne Rimmen Nielsen [Arhus, Denmark: Arhus University Press, 1991], 17-37). Still, scholars must seek to locate the woman’s “sphere” in a precise ideological or evidentiary context (as we endeavor to do in this book) and must never forget that the real divisions between men’s and women’s realms can easily mask the interdependence of those realms. Janet Wolff rightly emphasizes the constraining effects of the women’s “sphere” on the lives of real (middle-class) women and argues cogently for the complicity of “culture”—literature, the arts, and leisure activities—in its construction (Feminine Sentences: Esssays on Women and Culture [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990], esp. 12-33). On the interdependence of gender realms, even in such apparently male-dominated areas as foreign policy and the military, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), and Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 27. See Myriam Chimeénes, “La Princesse Edmond de Polignac et la création musicale,” in La Musique et le pouvoir, ed. Hugues Dufourt and Joél-Marie Fauquet (Paris: Aux amateurs

de livres, 1987), 125-45, and Jeanice Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 415-68.

28. Brief information on these and two dozen more of America’s most prominent women music patrons (e.g, Marian MacDowell, Martha Baird Rockefeller) is given in Whitesitt, “Women’s Support.” ‘Tully’s largesse, it should be added, was often bestowed anonymously through the Maya Corporation, which she founded. Concerning Belmont, Patrick J. Smith writes: “['T]he [Met] Guild, the almost single-handed creation of the dynamic Mrs. August Belmont, helped shore up the finances of the house in the later 1930s and was vital in channeling the enthusiasm of less affluent operagoers” (A Year at the Met [| New York: Knopf, 1983], 71). Belmont’s friend Mary Ellis Peltz organized and administered the Met Archive for years, without pay, and founded and edited the Guild’s widely respected magazine Opera News. Dissertations on Minneapolis and St. Paul are listed in

Introduction —21 Women’s Studies / Women’s Status, 68-69 (nos. 189, 207); a dissertation on Elise Boyer Hall is no. 222 (p. 71). Another major figure is the composer Eleanor Everest Freer, who funded the

annual David Bispham Medal honoring the best new opera composed in the English language; see Sylvia Miller Eversole, “Eleanor Everest Freer: Her Life and Music” (Ph.D. diss., * — CGity University of New York, 1992). Leon Botstein draws attention to yet another crucial patron, the founder of what later became the New York City Opera (a house dedicated to performing American opera and, in its early decades, opera in English translation): “Subjects for Debate: Women and Patronage in Music: Remembering Helen Huntington Hull (1893-1976),” Musical Quarterly 78 (1994): 641-45.

29. “Unlike Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Gertrude Clark Whittall is remembered less for fostering new music than for preserving old music. . . . [Her Strads, in their display cases in the Whittall Pavilion] have tended ... to reify the traditional string quartet repertory

played at the Library of Congress” (Joseph Kerman, “In Memory of Gertrude Clark Whittall,” unpublished address given on the fiftieth anniversary of the concert series sponsored by Whittall at the Library of Congress, May 1987). 30. See Anthony Rooley, “On Patronage: ‘Musick, that mind-tempering art’,” in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols., ed. John Paynter, Tim Howell, Richard Orton, and Peter Seymour (London: Routledge, 1992), 1: 226-47.

31. Nancy F Cott, “What’s in a Name: The Limits of Social Feminism, or Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 76 (1989): 809-29. See also various detailed studies of aspects of volunteering and social policy: J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Knopf, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Atstorical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Michael B. Katz, Lmproving Poor People: The Welfare State, the “Underclass,” and Urban Schools as History (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1995). The literature on voluntarism generally is surveyed in William H. Brackney, Christzan Voluntarism in Britain and North Amenca: A Bibliography and Criti-

cal Assessment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). 32. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Sarah

Deutsch, “Learning to Talk More Like a Man: Boston Women in Class-Bridging Organizations, 1870-1940,” American Historical Review 97 (1991-92): 379-404. More generally, Anne Firor Scott’s Natural Alles: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Thnols Press, 1991) well states the case for taking the work of women’s institutions seriously; see review by Lois W. Banner, Amencan Historical Review 98 (1992-93): 225~26. 33. Wendy Kaminer, Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain, and Politics of Unpaid Work from 1830 to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1984), 5.

34. Ibid., xvi. 35. “About half of the 124 active volunteers on the Parental Stress Line are not parents. ... And about 80 percent of them are women” (René Becker, “Volunteers,” Boston Magazine 80, no. 12 [December 1988]: 204). 36. Kaminer, Women Volunteering, xiv—xvi. Particularly interesting are two interviews by Kaminer with women who volunteered in the arts and then went on to political organizing (e.g., disarmament, desegregation, reproductive choice), 79-84, 113-21. Further comments from deeply committed (and/or self-glorifying—see Chapter 10 below) volunteers and

22 INTRODUCTION: LOCKE AND BARR social-agency board members are given in Susan A. Ostrander, Women of the Upper Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 111-39. 37. We are also disregarding for the moment the enormous contributions made in recent decades by the Ford Foundation, say, or the National Endowment for the Arts. ‘The latter, we note, is no faceless bureaucracy but rather has often been guided and publicly vali-

dated by prominent and determined women, e.g, Nancy Hanks, Joan Mondale, and, recently, Barbra Streisand. 38. Similar patterns are found in art clubs and other women’s groups: see Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 49, and Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associa-

tions in America, 1890-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). We might note an irony: women have had to fight the reputation of being unable to work cooperatively. This and other ancient prejudices were regularly noted and combated in Women in Music, the newsletter edited by Frédérique Petrides, the conductor of the pathbreaking Orchestrette Classique. All 37 issues are reprinted in facsimile in Jan Bell Groh, Evening the Score: Women in _ Music and the Legacy of Frédérique Petrides (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991). 39. Symptomatic is the treatment of women patrons in New Grove Dictionary of American

Musi. The encyclopedia was originally scheduled to include an article on patronage, but the idea was scrapped, we are told, when the editors finally realized that not enough basic research existed. ‘The justly praised article on “Women in [American] Music” by Judith

Tick, though, does refer to the work of Jeannette Thurber, and there are entries on Thurber and a few other patrons (e.g., Coolidge, Gardner, Walton). 40. Richard Crawford, “Studying American Music,” Institute for Studies of American Music Newsletter 14, no. 2 (May 1985), 1-2, 10-13, quotation from p. 11. 41. Pamela Perry, “The Role of Women as Patrons of Music in Connecticut during the Nineteenth and ‘Twentieth Centuries” (DMA thesis, University of Hartford, 1986), [iv]; Catherine Parsons Smith, “Founding the Hollywood Bowl,” American Music 11 (1993): 206-42. Another possible case of substitution is discussed in Vignette F, n. 10; the beneficiary in that case was Igor Stravinsky (in Europe), the money American. Of course, many women’s contributions to American musical life and institutions have been honestly admitted from the start, e.g., that of Jeanne Wynne Estes and Ruth Porter Doster, two early proponents of Bach choirs in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (see Raymond Walters, The Bethlehem Bach Choir: An Historical and Lnterpretwe Sketch |Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918], 44-46, 204, 212-13, 215; and, confirming Fstes’s importance, Robin Leaver, “New Light on the Pre-History of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem,” Bach: The Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute 12 [1991], no. 2: 24-34).

42. In March 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum lost a dozen precious art works in a widely reported burglary. The Tapestry Room, in which concerts have been held for decades, is the upper half of the original concert hall (see Chapter 9). 43. ‘his naming question (should we say “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” or “Amy Beach’’?) foregrounds the irresolvable tension between historically authentic terminology and present-day usage, as do analogous questions (e.g., “Negro,” “Black,” “black American,” “AfricanAmerican”). 44. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Wrtzng a Woman’s Life (New York: Norton, 1988), 22 (summarizing, in part, Patricia Spacks). 45. Anthony Tommasini, Virgel Thomson’s Musical Portraits (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), IOI, 110, 112, 115 (the “rock-bound”—-Thomson’s phrase—Constance Askew), 124,

Introduction —.23 139-40 (Guggenheim quotation), 151, 179, 196. Could Guggenheim have been amusing her-

self with the tart comments in Thomson’s ch. 7 on the effects of private patronage on a composer's style? “Composers living on subsidies personal or impersonal [e.g., governmen-

tal],” it reads, “tend to write introspective music of strained harmonic texture and emphatic instrumental style. ... They think of themselves . . . as persecuted men. Appearing to be persecuted is, of course, their way of earning their living” (Virgil Thomson, The State of Music [1939; rev. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1962], go—91).

ONE

Patronage—and Women—in America’s Musical Lite An Overview of a Changing Scene Ralph RP Locke and Cyrilla Barr

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICA’S MUSICAL INSTITUTIONS Music has always been a much-practiced, highly variegated activity in the United States. ‘This musical diversity, and the contentious partisanship that has marked certain branches of it (such as the recurrent tension between supporters of “classical” and “popular” music), reflect various more fundamental diversities and tensions within American life, involving such factors as race, ethnicity, social class, geography, and means of livelihood (e.g., agricultural communities vs. cities). Long before the arrival of settlers from across the sea, Native Americans had developed rich and varied traditions of ritual dance and song; European colonists and enslaved Africans carried with them from across the sea the musical dialects of their various places of origin and the desire to continue making music in ways (and on instruments) familiar and meaningful to them. ‘These various musical traditions—Native American, European, African, and others not yet mentioned— then blended here into new hybrid languages and genres, but the extent and proportions of the blending varied a great deal. The musical melting pot particularly welcomed certain stylistic elements from one or another of these repertoires or musical traditions: for example, the hierarchically structured harmonic vocabulary of European art and dance music combined in diverse ways with certain improvisatory rhythmic practices from African traditions, especially various kinds of syncopation. Other repertoires and traditions, notably the various Native American musics, tended to have much less impact on the country’s emerging musical styles and genres. (Scholars cite various inhibiting factors, technical as well as cultural.)! This selective process of interethnic musical contact was particularly fruitful in what H. Wiley Hitchcock calls America’s “vernacular” genres, such as the African-American spiritual (leading to today’s gospel music), the minstrel show and musical comedy, ragtime, jazz, and, more recently, salsa and other styles featuring prominent Caribbean (African-Hispanic) elements.” 24

Patronage—and Women—in Amenca’s Musical Life 25

Parallel with the broad stream of “vernacular” music making (which of course also includes more strictly European-derived genres such as Anglo-American ballads and Country-Western music) flows what Hitchcock calls the “cultivated” stream, which concerns us in this book. In the mid nineteenth century this consisted of an entirely European-based yet cosmopolitan set of practices, preferences, and repertoires, including a more or less canonical yet eclectic corpus of sacred and secular works—for example, Handel’s Messiah, Donizetti’s Lucia dt Lammermoor, and piano pieces by Stephen Heller, a Hungarian Jew who had, like the Polish Chopin, made Paris his home and successful base of operations. These diverse works were transplanted more or less intact to the New World, and to them were added, increasingly with the passing decades, American works written firmly

in this European tradition (e.g., church hymns of Lowell Mason, the Italianlanguage opera Leonora by William Henry Fry, and piano music of William Mason

and the German émigré Charles Grobe). Certain strands of “cultivated” music making remained stylistically “frozen” for decades after first arriving on these shores: the German-speaking Moravian settlers of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, for example, for decades performed a relatively stable repertoire of string trios, choral motets, and the like, in a style close to that of Franz Joseph Haydn, and occasionally added to it new pieces written in a closely similar style. Such unaltered continuity, though, was the exception to the rule. For the most part, the repertoire of “cultivated” music in America changed a good deal over the course of the nineteenth century, thanks not only to local influences but also to America’s continuing contact with the Old World. The latest pieces were shipped over, hot off the press, along with Irish linens, Scotch whiskey, French perfumes, and the latest installments of Dickens’s novels. By around 1870, many of the best young American musicians were going to Europe to study with the pianists Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetizky, the violinist Martin Marsick, the singer Mathilde Marchesi, and other famed teachers in Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere, then returning to America to perform the pieces they had heard and learned—for example, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and the Parisian operas of the German-born but Italian-trained Giacomo Meyerbeer— and, in many cases, to compose in up-to-date style and to teach.’ As early as the 1820s, significant numbers of well-known opera stars and virtuoso instrumentalists, eventually including the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind and the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, came from Europe on concert tours. Some stayed for years or even settled here permanently.* Also, many of the larger cities, especially on the eastern seaboard, enjoyed performances by traveling opera companies such as the one led ;

by the tenor Manuel Garcia (father of the great singers Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot), since at that point few cities had their own self-supporting resident troupes. New Orleans was the earliest exception and, “for much of the century,” one scholar plausibly concludes, enjoyed “the best opera to be heard in America”—sung mainly in French, of course.° “Cultivated” music, it should be stressed, extended its domain far beyond the

26 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR concert hall and opera house. For one thing, there were few such halls until late in the nineteenth century, and even professional concerts tended to be presented in a wide range of venues: theaters, Masonic halls, parks and pleasure gardens, train stations. But formal (and informal) concerts were but one of many outlets for the love of “cultivated” music in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Throughout the land, music of what we might call the “light classical” variety was a prime form of leisure-time activity and social entertainment. Dancing, for example, was accompanied by a few string and wind players, or maybe just a single violinist. (Dancing masters in America, as in Europe, played a special “kit” fiddle

small enough to slip into the coat pocket.) Children of the middle and upper classes were early trained to play instruments—for girls, these were most often gul-

tar, harp, harpsichord, or piano—or to sing, delighting family and friends with keyboard pieces such as FrantiSek KocZwara’s internationally beloved The Battle of Prague (first published in Dublin around 1788) or tuneful vocal excerpts from Eu-

ropean operas.° (Among the best loved, in the 1860s and 1870s, were Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore, Sir Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, and Charles Gounod’s Faust.)!

Hard as it may be to believe today, amateur music making in the late eighteenth

and nimeteenth centuries, indeed even in the first half of the twentieth, did not cease when a child finished his or her teenage years. Adults regularly gathered to play chamber music and sing together; Thomas Jefferson, an avid violinist, made frequent use of his large collection of the latest imported trios and such, and many people knew the singing voices of their parents, siblings, or spouses well, having sung hymns, Stephen Foster songs, or operatic excerpts together at the parlor piano. Choral groups thrived in the churches, and by 1800 also in other meeting halls, sometimes handily mastering the hymns and secular partsongs of homegrown composers such as Wiliam Bulings, and sometimes working their way in determined fashion through the demanding but rewarding oratorios of Handel, Haydn, and other European masters. Bands and small orchestras, too, sprang up everywhere, playing opera overtures, movements of symphonies, song arrangements, marches, waltzes—almost anything that had a pleasant tune and enough regularity of beat and phrase to set toes happily tapping. All of this—from quadrilles for dancing, to choruses and bands—provided the fertile soul from which many of the musical institutions of America that support and promote “serious” or “classical” music sprang. (Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s attachment to music, for example, was surely rooted in the family musicales of her youth, described lovingly in her mother’s little booklet, Pleasant Memones of My Life.\’ The development was long and troubled, and, in the nation’s early decades, little patronage was in place to help it along, whether from institutions or individuals of wealth. As Richard Crawford points out: | Whereas Europe has had a centuries-long tradition of church, court, and state patronage of | music of the highest quality[,] . . . in America neither a national church,

Patronage—and Women—ain Amenca’s Musical Life 27

nor an aristocratic court existed, and the state’s need has been limited to simple music for utilitarian functions [e.g., military bands]... . Foremost of the shapers [of America’s musical life] have been the musicians themselves, who have worked as individuals in a commercial environment seeking to satisfy the needs of various social groups—for artistic expression, worship, instruction, entertainment, or participatory recreation.?

Private citizens took lessons from music masters and even hired professionals to play chamber music with them or to perform for their guests. One such melomane, Elizabeth Ridgely, possessed a musical library in the 1820s that testifies to her openness (and that of her French-born teacher) to a wide range of current European music and suggests that a substantial amount of amateur and professional music making went on at the Ridgelys’ manor house (Hampton, Maryland).'° But the first real “wave” of patronage as it is currently understood seems to come in the 1830s. It was then that Lowell Mason and Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society began carrying out energetic organizational and promotional labors on behalf of music in the schools, churches, and concert halls.'' Far less well known are the efforts, around the same time, of various groups of parish1oners—especially women—to raise money to buy organs for their churches (see Vignette A). From then onward into the late twentieth century, patrons increasingly vied with the musicians themselves in their dedication to and active organizational work for the benefit of art music in America. The crucial, formative moment of music patronage in America, and of “classical music” generally, occurs in the decades just before and after 1g00. During those years many of the institutions and practices that have remained characteristic of American musical life ever since were established and put on a firm financial and organizational basis. ‘These institutions and practices include the symphony orchestra, with its season-ticket holders in sober or sometimes even formal attire (and its small-town equivalent: the half-amateur, half-professional community orchestra, often playing in a school or college auditortum, church, or town hall);!* the opera house with its decor in red plush and brass and its international casts, often singing in a foreign language; the conservatory and music school, earnestly fillmg the growing demand for trombonists, for coloratura sopranos, even for composers pondering, in newspapers and magazines, such questions as “Should we be writing symphonies in a distinctively American style?”; publishing houses churning out songs and piano pieces in sheet-music format for the amateur to perform at home or in small assembly; the newspaper column boosting or blasting the visiting artist or the local luminary; secondary-school bands and choruses, teacher-training programs for those who would lead them, and of course the pri-

vate vocal or instrumental studio; instrument factories and dealers to provide homes and schools with cheap but solid flutes and pianos (as well as elaborate, decorated art-case grand pianos for the White House and for mansions ranging from

that of the Dohenys in Southern California to the homes of the Marquands and

the Vanderbilts in Manhattan); elementary courses in music appreciation,

28 CHAPTER |: LOCKE AND BARR whether for grade-schoolers, college students, or concertgoing adults; and graduate programs and tenured university chairs in music and its scholarly study. (From this long list of activities in music, a few have long been particularly identified with women: public school teaching, choral conducting—but not orchestral or band, except with all-female ensembles—and of course performance and studio teaching in voice, piano, and harp. Later in this chapter, we shall return to the question of women’s expanding place in American musical life.) Everything mentioned in the previous paragraph existed only in embryonic form, if at all, in the mid nineteenth century; nearly all of it had taken recognizable shape—and much of it was fully developed and flourishing—by the 1920s.'° As one very concrete example, in 1870 the music holdings of the Library of Congress comprised an oddly assorted five hundred items; by 1917 the Library could boast a wellorganized Music Division, its near-million items carefully selected and overseen by Oscar Sonneck, a world-class musicologist.'* The sudden growth in America’s musical life over but a few decades echoed developments taking place in the visual arts—for example, museums—and indeed other sectors of American life entirely, such as hospitals and public schools. The American university, the historian Robert A. McGaughey notes, hardly existed in 1870, but by around 1914, it “had acquired a form little changed since.”'? Furthermore, many of these other “sectors” have their own important musical aspect: it was during the decades Just before and after the turn of the century that, consonant with the ideals of the Progressive movement, choral singing and music appreciation courses began finding their way into the public school and into that parallel institution for immigrants, the settlement house.'® Of course, the more things stay the same, the more they change. Musical life has been greatly altered since the 1920s by shifts in American demographic patterns (the shift of money and power from our urban centers to the suburbs or 1ndeed to other geographic areas entirely, such as, recently, the Sunbelt) and by cul-

tural values that increasingly emphasize instant gratification as a goal, to be attained through the purchase of commercial goods.'’ More particularly, the rise of technology in the service of the consumption principle just mentioned has resulted in a shift away from “live” and participatory music making and toward listening to recordings; this process, set in motion by the arrival of the home phono-

graph around 1890 and the home radio around 1925, intensified with the ever-increasing fidelity of sound reproduction and the proliferation, since around 1970, of tape cassette players—especially as portables (ranging from “boomboxes” and pocket-size machines with headsets to sound systems in automobiles). Opera, in particular, has gained a major and often sophisticated “second” audience in the past ten years; thanks to electronic video (whether in the movie theater or on television, videotape, or video disc), opera lovers, even in isolated locations, can “attend” performances of once little-known operas such as Verdi’s Steffeho, experience the dark power of Wagner’s Ring cycle or Britten’s Peter Grimes, and be devastated by the artistry of ‘Teresa Stratas, Julia Migenes, or—in a gripping black-and-white video of Yosca, act 2—Maria Callas. (For further discussion of the opportunities

Patronage—and Women—in America’s Musical Life 2g

and challenges presented by electronic technology, see Chapter 10.) But “canned” music, even at its best, cannot replicate the experience of being part of a performance’s “first” audience, that is, of hearing music in person, in a good hall, amidst a mutually inciting throng of several hundred or several thousand attentive listeners; and, for better or worse, America’s system for delivering live performances of Western art music to the public (or for the public to make such music itself) remains, in its broad features, the one put in place around 1goo. The growth and systematization—the “modernization,” in the sociologist’s term—of America’s musical life around 1900 resulted in large part from the nation’s immense industrial and economic expansion at the time, as the growing middle and upper classes, and even certain sectors of the working masses, increasingly found themselves with surplus cash and the leisure time in which to spend it: on modestly fashionable clothing, on books and magazines filled with enticing ads for consumer products, and, not least, on outings to amusement parks, theaters, and concert halls.!° Hilda Satt, a young immigrant woman at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, no doubt spoke for throngs of working people when she later recalled as among her chiefest pleasures attending performances of opera and musical comedy; works such as The Merry Widow “were a good tonic after a day of hard work,” and she considered herself privileged to have seen and heard such gifted operatic interpreters as Enrico Caruso and Jean de Reszke, Marcella Sembrich and Emma Calvé, and “the great Chaliapin.”!' Some of the musical institutions mentioned earlier—publishing, journalism, the instrument trade—sprang up more or less spontaneously, in response to the pressures of the marketplace. But Beethoven symphonies and Wagner operas require long, costly rehearsals involving fifty or even a hundred highly trained, specialized performers. (Legendary Tristans, such as Jean de Reszke, do not come cheap.) The laws of supply and demand simply could not produce affordable, accessible, yet still worthy performances of such works, any more than it could produce universities or hospitals. Federal and local governments have throughout most of the twentieth century provided cultural and charitable organizations with certain financial protections through income-tax deductions and local propertytax exemptions, but direct, European-style government aid would have been

needed as well in order to fill the gap. Despite the early efforts of Jeannette Thurber and others to change federal policy, direct aid was not a politically acceptable option until the creation of the—relatively modest, by European standards—National Endowment for the Arts under the Johnson administration in 1965. One 1930s precedent for the NEA, though, should be mentioned. ‘The New Deal’s program in the arts (e.g., the Federal Theater Project) was intensely controversial and, in the end, more a stopgap measure than a permanent governmental fixture. Memory of it fades with the passing years: its “Dime Concerts” in athletic stadiums, its hundreds of music-teaching centers across the country, and its creation—in 1936, in New York City—of the nation’s first public high school for music and art.”° Still, it may serve to remind us that, if Americans want it

30 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR enough, we can do things at the governmental level to increase democratic access to music. PATRONAGE: INDIVIDUALS AND FOUNDATIONS

Since the marketplace did not support orchestras, opera houses, and professional (or even preparatory-level) music schools, and since government money was rarely forthcoming, the gap was filled, as it was in other areas such as social work, by patronage—taking the word to include also volunteer organizational work (unpaid labor).*! Patronage could and often did involve networks of small patrons: an orchestra’s subscribers often made individual modest financial and in-kind contributions beyond the price of their season tickets (see Chapter 2). But the lion’s share of patronage funds, especially in the decades around 1900, came directly from a small number of wealthy individuals and, to some extent, from the cultural “foundations” established by such individuals or their families. The great fortunes that piled up in the late nineteenth century were the direct result of industrial growth in an era of laissez-faire capitalism. Until the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, corporations, by virtue of their charters, were free to conduct business more or less as they liked, free of governmental regulation. As a result, the financial holdings of the Vanderbilt family, for example, reportedly exceeded those of all but a handful of the most developed nations of the world.” Profits from industrial and other investments were so high that a family’s income often far exceeded expenses, even after deducting for club memberships, yachts, town houses, country estates, world cruises, winters in sunnier climes, salaries for household staff, and bills for schooling, clothing, and medical care. How to dispense the excess—or, in the language of the time, how wealth was “stewarded’”’— depended greatly upon the individual’s whims and interests. For many, this meant beginning to deal with the socioeconomic disasters created in part by the capitalist system that had made their own families so comfortable. (In this project they were

encouraged by the important “social gospel” movement within the country’s Protestant churches.)”° For others, it meant building the American university, a development that, as Robert A. McGaughey notes, helped provide men of privileged class—including certain sons of the very men who had made the fortunes—with a way to make “respectable livings other than in the church or business.”*#

Fortunately for music lovers, the industrialists and their immediate families often gave a high priority to music, higher indeed than we today might think likely (given the stereotype of the inartistic business mind). ‘This is strikingly illustrated in Andrew Carnegie’s ranking of the projects that he deemed most worthy of philanthropic aid, wherein music—under the heading “suitable concert halls’—came in fifth, after public parks and before public baths.*? He also put theory into practice, as music lovers in New York City and Pittsburgh have daily reason to recall.

Foundations were the other major beneficiary in a rich man’s or, less often, woman’s will, and were usually administered by a council of his or her surviving

Patronage—and Women—in America’s Musical Life 31

friends and associates, lawyers and bankers, and some family members. There was as yet no “science of giving,” and although some notable examples of foundations, such as the Peabody Foundation (1867), may be found in the late nineteenth cen-

tury, few survived more than a few decades. Only in the twentieth century did foundations (e.g., Ford, Rockefeller, Guggenheim) become a major force in the cul-

tural arena, strengthened by the creation of income tax, inheritance tax, and taxexempt status.*® Even so, music was slow to benefit.

In the early 1930s, the directors of the Carnegie Corporation financed a study to answer the questions “What aspects of music in America today seem the most important?” and “How can music best be furthered?” The findings were disseminated in Eric Clarke’s Music in Everyday Life and Randall Thompson’s study of music in the curricula of thirty liberal arts colleges in the United States.*”? While efforts such as these exerted a valuable influence upon corporate giving, the causes needing support grew apace. Philanthropy was beginning to develop as a fine art, shaped largely by corporate bodies whose chief executives were men.

THE “DOMESTIC SPHERE”? WOMEN AND MUSIC IN HOME AND CLUB Parallel to this more or less official, highly institutionalized story runs the more frag-

mented story of the other half (at least) of America’s music lovers, the women, whose patronage and volunteer work is explored in this volume. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a significant number of them did have substantial money of their own (largely inherited), and in many cases, depending on the laws prevailing at the time in a given state, were free to spend it as they saw fit.”° In addition, many women influenced the way their husbands’ money was disbursed, at least in matters over which they were considered to hold some authority, such as education and, precisely, the cultivation of the arts. The musical initiatives of such women as Isabella

Stewart Gardner, Bertha Honoré Palmer (of Chicago), and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney owed much to the wealth and position of their husbands or fathers. Yet, whatever the sources of their money, these women often exhibited entrepreneurial savvy 1n its distribution and were in many cases guided by relatively democratic and (by standards of the day) well-informed views on social and cultural policy.’ Moreover, these patrons of music, like women who supported the visual arts, theater, and dance, carried out their work in venues that were more publicly visible than the institutions of social welfare devoted to the care of the sick and poor, aged and young, that had been the primary out-of-home arena for female reformers in the early and mid nineteenth century. In this way, they may have helped to prepare public acceptance of working women taking positions of authority for pay. And certainly they stand as major early examples of women who, freer of certain social limitations than most other women of their place and time, freer to act and to influence, could devote their energy and imagination to, in Mary Catherine Bateson’s phrase, “composing a life” of varied and gratifying texture, not just

32 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR taking from the larger world but also interacting with it, indeed acting upon it in productive ways.°° Money, we said earlier, is only one way of contributing to a cause. Many women less affluent than a Mrs. Potter Palmer (but still “comfortable”) assisted the growth of musical institutions primarily through volunteer work, including the raising of funds from others. ‘(hese women most often remain nameless in the chronicles of the major symphony orchestras, festivals, and educational institutions that still bear the imprint of their devotion and generosity. Such “grassroots” work, in music or

other areas, is therefore more difficult to chronicle but is nonetheless of crucial significance. Kathleen D. McCarthy has shown that women who had established a visual-arts organization were often expected, at the point where it had gathered a significant endowment or collection, to hand over control to a board of male managers, although the women may have remained active in various ways.” Similar phenomena occurred in the musical arena, as Linda Whitesitt notes in Chapter 2 below, reminding us of the ever-present tension between possibilities and limits for women in public life. Still, the musical clubwomen and volunteers, perhaps even more than the wealthy patronesses discussed in the previous paragraph, helped in their way to render “obsolete the notion that ‘women’s place is in the home,’ and thereby made a significant contribution to women’s struggle for autonomy.”*? We should resist, though, the temptation to treat these various types of women patrons simply as rediscovered heroines.’ Scholars in recent years have struggled to find adequate ways of describing the complexities and contradictions of the life of a woman of leisure or at least modest comfort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, women at all social levels were limited to varying extents (less so in the case of poor and working women) by the ideology of the “female sphere,” with its emphasis on “piety, purity, and submissiveness” in the

service of “domesticity, nurture, and education.”** On the other hand, women often developed their own strategies of resistance to such limitations, creating a rich web of emotional ties to relatives and to women friends that amounted at

times, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and others have argued, to a distinctive “women’s culture,” full of mutual assistance and support. In comparison, the lives

of middle- and upper-class men—often spent almost entirely in the “male sphere”—may appear to some of us today emotionally cramped and deprived.” The tendency, among certain women’s historians, to emphasize the positive, creative, interactive aspects of women’s lives (and to doubt whether men’s lives were quite as rewarding as sometimes advertised) might be accused of disguising or denying the existence of male privilege and female subordination. One needs always to keep in mind that men’s constricted choices, unlike women’s, helped pre-

pare them for successful careers and for dominant, sometimes tyrannical control over the family’s property, finances, and major life decisions (such as a child’s choice of spouse); bourgeois men were indeed limited yet, as Marilyn Frye puts it, not oppressed.*° But perhaps the renewed interest in the workings of the women’s realm can be more fairly described, not as ignoring the dissymmetry of power, but

Patronage—and Women—ain Amenca’s Musical Life —-33

as taking it as given in a particular historical situation, the aim being, not to endorse or reinscribe the patriarchal system, but rather to explore the often meaningful lives that women made for themselves and their children within it and sometimes despite it.

Rigid gender differentiation was, one should stress, urged upon daughters at least as much by their mothers as by their fathers. Indeed, central to family relations in the nineteenth century was what might be described as a female “apprenticeship system,” through which, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg puts it, “older

women carefully trained daughters in the arts of housewifery and motherhood.”*’ These arts receive less respect today than they once used to, given the increasing tendency among women to flee and sometimes to denigrate the lives of service that their mothers and grandmothers lived, and to model their own lives according to definitions of success and identity that are traditionally male (more or less equivalent to what Adam Smith described as “economic man,” earning his own living and acquiring goods and services in the commercial marketplace). Today, women and men alike are faced with the challenge of balancing these competing ideals of economic interdependence and independence, resisting or accepting (colluding in?) “our society’s widespread devaluation of care,” as the “transformative feminist” Suzanne Gordon puts it.°® As for earlier days, we should remember that many of the “arts” most despised today—housework, food preparation, sewing and darning, various physical aspects of childcare—required more skill, time, and physical exertion than they do today, yet were either essential to family health or helped limit expenses and thus formed in a sense a second income. And, at least in certain families, exercising these accomplishments and managerial skills graced the women who knew them with dignity and authority. The tension between negative and positive readings of women’s lives is thus not so much a matter of disagreement among scholars as a reflection of the tensions within those lives. And so there remains a certain peril for anyone who would attempt to comprehend just how women of an earlier era perceived themselves, their mission, and the relationship between that mission and other aspects of their lives. In some cases described in subsequent chapters of this book, the tugs and pulls are apparent: ambition for a career and for a sense of public validation is viewed as being incompatible with devotion to husband and children, and both of these may be hard to reconcile with societal expectations of other sorts. Seen in this context, a woman’s activist work in the arts, especially when undertaken as part of a cooperative venture with other women, comes to seem a brilliantly functional solution to the contradictions of the life of the middle- and upper-class “lady”: it reasserts her bond to others of her family and class and, simultaneously, enables her to “connect purposefully” to the larger community (the phrase comes from Nancy Cott’s discussion of women’s organized church groups),”” all without threatening her husband’s prerogatives as breadwinner in what one (male) observer at the time sensitively qualified as “the field of «mmediaiely productive work”

34 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR (our emphasis) and as player—if the husband were so inclined—in the arena of governmental politics.*° How clubs, and especially music clubs, helped connect women to other women outside their homes and to the larger world will become immediately apparent in Chapter 2.*! For the moment, we can glimpse some of the feelings that such clubs tapped, including a sober desire for self-tmprovement and a generous willingness to share one’s own privileges, by taking a brief look at the Friday Club of Chicago,

founded in 1887, three years before the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Ellen Martin Henrotin, one of the group’s prime movers, addressed the first gathering of these Chicago ladies in terms that left no doubt as to the implications of the club movement for the members themselves: For years most of you have been hard at work at your studies. You have doubtlessly many original thoughts and theories which you will be glad to impart to others and also many of you have enjoyed educational advantages peculiarly your own, which you can thus share with others. If you never discuss literature and art, and if you allow society [1.e., empty socializing] to engross all your time and attention, you will even lose your love for serious things, and what can be more valuable to you as life goes on... ? The formation of such a club as this should be a very serious matter,

for the mere fact of being a member of it may influence the term of your whole life. *

The Friday Club may have been making a bold statement in even designating itself as a “club.” The word was more commonly associated with men’s groups, which is likely why the (admittedly rather more “stuffy”) Fortnightly of Chicago, founded fourteen years earlier, chose to eschew it in its title. ‘That the ladies of the Friday Club enthusiastically supported issues that reflect a turning of attention toward the needs and aspirations of women is shown by papers read at meetings, such as “Women in Municipal Government” and “Modern Women in Recent Literature.”*> The group also maintained an active, indeed activist, music and art department: during the Depression, the club purchased and distributed season tickets to the Chicago Symphony, thus in a single stroke assisting the orchestra, its players (some of whom might otherwise have had to bear pay cuts or be laid off), and music lovers who in chilly economic times could not afford the privilege of attending. THE RISE OF THE WOMAN MUSICIAN

In this book we emphasize the contributions of wealthy women (frequently the daughters or wives of professional men or industrialists) and of women of lesser means who supported musical life equally—although in a different manner—but still also from the sidelines. This should not, however, lead us entirely to neglect the role of women performers and composers as activists in the cause of music and, by their very public presence, in the cause of women. The large lines of the story of the American woman musician can be told in

Patronage—and Women—in America’s Musical Life 35

terms of what Linda K. Kerber calls “a Whiggish progressivism.” Just as historians have tended to see the central theme of American women’s political lives as “an inexorable march toward the suffrage,”* so the following account is based on the somewhat simplistic, yet not entirely misleading, view of the musical women of America as striking blow after blow for the right to make music under the same conditions as men.*°

During the colonial period and continuing through much of the nineteenth century, American women were not permitted to make music seriously, professionally, publicly—as opposed to recreationally or consolingly in home or church.

Furthermore, they were discouraged from even learning most kinds of instruments: loud, low, or bulky ones (trombone, tuba, cello, double bass), ones whose playing required unladylike facial contortions (oboe), and so on.*’ As mentioned earlier, this basically left piano and voice (and a few instruments of more limited repertoire, such as harp and guitar) as the primary options available to a young woman. Not by chance, these instruments were perfect for domestic performance: the harp and guitar were soft-toned and unclangorous, and the harp and especially the piano were archetypally nonportable, “indoor” vehicles and thus well-suited to women’s home-centered lives. (The same can be said of the chamber organ, used in many homes to assist family hymn singing.) As for the voice, it required no training whatever, at least not for smging hymn tunes and simple ballads. Singing also had the advantage of involving words. The amateur female singer could proclaim her religious devotion through music, lead her children in song, or—especially if she had had a few lessons—repeat (and repeat), in the privacy of the home, the rejoicing or lamenting aria of some operatic heroine, excerpted from an opera that she had read about in a novel or a journalist’s essay or had once, safely escorted, been privileged to see on stage. ‘The few women who performed music professionally in these early years were mostly singers of opera and oratorio and, as Adrienne Fried Block has observed, often came from “‘a musical or theatrical family.”*®

In the second half of the nineteenth century, matters changed a great deal. Music and music teaching (the joint category used for many decades by the US. census) formed a rapidly expanding job sector; by 1900, Judith ‘Tick notes, it numbered “8% of all professional workers” in the country. Women were a big part of this increase: between 1870 and 1910, the number of women holding jobs (including part-time work) in some aspect of music “increased eightfold, and the proportion of women in music rose from 36% to 60%, the highest it was ever to reach before 1970.”*° The proportion dropped after 1910 as the field expanded, became

professionalized and better-paying, and began attracting larger numbers of men—a familiar pattern in women’s history. (Lo be accurate, the raw numbers of female musicians and music teachers did increase throughout the first half of the twentieth century—but not as rapidly as before 1g10, nor as rapidly as the numbers of males now entering the profession.)° In the final decades of the nineteenth century, “a few American-born women

emerged as professional performers and composers of vernacular and parlor

36 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR music and later of art music.”?! By century’s end, women soloists—singers, violin-

ists, planists—were taking up performing careers that involved heavy concert tours. The circuit in those days extended far beyond the few (mostly East Coast) metropolises that had some sort of established symphony orchestra or opera troupe. As Oscar G. Sonneck remarked in 1916, “many western cities, barely out of the backwoods stage of civilization, ... [are] pushing forward musically with such rapidity and energy that they have already changed the ways of musical America in a few years.”°? Such advances resulted in large part from the willing-

ness of musicians and ensembles—the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, the Mendelssohn Club, and the Germania Society, but also such remarkable female performers as the violinists Gamilla Urso and Maud Powell and the masterful p1anist Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler—-to brave the inconvenience and hardships of touring the hinterlands. Wherever they performed, women faced an additional hurdle: the prejudice against women professionals. Even the most distinguished fingerwork, the most searching interpretations, could not lay to rest the damning judgment “Plays well for a woman.” ‘he one early exception was opera, which could not do without women; nineteenth-century American society idolized the female star—while considering her, like actresses and women dancers, socially suspect—and paid her more than equivalent male singers. Some singers were multi-talented and in a later generation might instead have flourished as pianists, composers, or conductors (e.g, in Europe, Pauline Viardot and Marcella Sembrich). The prejudices against women musicians in Western art music knew no borders. Saint-Saéns, for example, complained of the composer Augusta Holmés: “Women are curious when they seriously concern themselves with art. They seem

desirous first of all to make one forget they are women, and to show an overflowing virility, without dreaming that it is precisely this preoccupation which betrays the woman.”°? Many an American critic, too, searched for such signs of ladies protesting too much.”* Despite prejudice and discouragement, American women in the early decades of the twentieth century did, increasingly, compose, give recitals (although, Olga Samaroff complained, for lower pay than men), and sing in public (even after mar-

riage). ‘hey formed chamber groups, notably the Eichberg Ladies String Quartette and the Olive Mead Quartet, and larger ensembles such as the oddly titled Vienna Damen Orchester and the Boston Fadette Lady Orchestra (named for the heroine of George Sand’s novella La Petite Fadette [1848]). By the 1920s and 1930s, when the ranks of the major orchestras in this country were still restricted to men,

women founded full symphony orchestras of their own—playing all those longforbidden loud and awkward and temptingly portable instruments—and also began an active epistolary campaign to break down the barriers restricting them from positions in the country’s mainstream ensembles.°? Maud Powell put the issue plainly:

Patronage—and Women—in Amenca’s Musical Life 37 Of course women should play in symphony and other orchestras, if they want the work. Wanting the work implies measuring up to the standards of musical and technical efficiency, with strength to endure well, hours of rehearsing and often the strain of travel, broken habits and poor food. Many women are amply fitted for work; such women should be employed on an equal footing with men. I fail to see that any argument to the contrary is valid. But if they accept the work they should be prepared to expect no privileges because of their sex. They must dress quietly and as fine American women they must uphold high standards of conduct.°°

As for composers, they, by the nature of things, depended on the support of conductors. Mabel Daniels once confided to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge that “when a woman undertakes to write seriously for orchestra she is looked at rather askance by conductors. .. . ?'m just starting to launch a piece for full orchestra and the final question I was asked was “Do you do your own orchestration?’ which makes me furious.”°’ When the British composer Ethel Smyth wrote to tell Coolidge that Oxford was finally making her a doctor of music, she added, “but except for Sir Henry Wood none of our conductors take my work to America—nor will they ’til the grave has done away with the petticoat element.”°® The situation was doubly prejudicial in the case of a talented woman performer or composer who also happened to be wealthy. Of the composer-pianist Mary Howe, the conductor William Strickland remarked that “both her position and her sex militated against her: ‘The former marked her as a ‘dilettante,’ and the latter prevented her from being taken seriously.”°? A number of the women patrons discussed in the present book, had they been born several generations later or been born into less wealthy families, would have made their marks, and their own livings, in some aspect of the professional music world. As it was, they made no livings from their music (most of them), but stul, through patronage and activism, they made marks of a different kind.

TOWARD A TYPOLOGY OF MUSIC PATRONAGE

Women’s organizational activities in music in the United States, as is becoming clear, are too extensive and varied to be easily encapsulated in simple generalizations,°° much less in jokes and stereotypes.°! Taken together with certain other recent scholarly work on specific patrons (e.g., by Catherine Parsons Smith) and set in the context of more general work on women’s organizational activities in America (e.g, by Anne Firor Scott and Karen J. Blair), the studies in this book help reveal that women’s patronage of music has comprised many widely differing activities, each of them distinctive in its internal dynamics and the interpretive issues it raises. Uhese various activities can be helpfully examined by using categories proposed by Kathleen D. McCarthy for patrons of the visual arts. ‘These three categories are analogous in many ways to the two rather simple ones that we employed in our Introduction (“individuals” vs. “groups”), but they make a further division, within the “groups” category, between “separatists” (by which McCarthy means

38 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR groups composed—programmatically and ideologically—of women, such as most art clubs and pottery guilds) and “assimuationists” (in this category she includes women who served on museum boards with men and who, too often, found themselves marginalized in various ways by male board members or by—again, male—museum officials). As for women who worked alone, McCarthy terms them not “individuals” but “individualists,” thereby stressing that these (mostly very wealthy) women carried out their patronage work independently, each according to her own lights and often in areas of art that were neglected by the traditional museums (one example being Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the moving force behind both the Museum of Modern Art and the important museum of American folk art in Williamsburg, Virginia, that bears her name). Ot McCarthy’s three categories, it is this last that makes the cleanest fit when transferred to music patronage. We tend to have particularly rich documentation

of the activities of “individualist” women patrons in music, but, predictably enough, the abundance of data only reveals how diverse and often headstrong they were—hence hard to generalize about. One perhaps surprising trend that has been noticed is that a number of them took (and, to some extent, take) active part in promoting new and experimental composition. In Chapter 8 below, for example, Carol J. Oja explores in detail the ways in which a small number of individual wealthy women in New York in the 1920s, including Gertrude Vanderbilt

Whitney (better known today for her art patronage) and Alma Morgenthau Wertheim, supported the composers of new or “modernist” music such as Henry Cowell and the young Aaron Copland: they opened their homes and purses to the composers, just as they, or women very much like them, did to struggling modern painters and poets. Indeed, it has been suggested by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (in regard to literature), Kathleen D. McCarthy (visual art), and Catherine Parsons Smith (music) that the avant-garde provided a forum in which women could exert productive influence, as opposed to more mainstream cultural institutions, which tended to be dominated by male patrons and directors. In the case of visual art, in particular, new work had the advantage of being “relatively inexpensive compared to the prices that men like [ J. Pierpont] Morgan [and art museums, largely run and funded by men,] were willing—and able—to pay for the masterpieces that they so avidly pursued.” Similar economic advantages may have been at work in music: Alma Wertheim could help bring to performance or publication a dozen modern chamber works, or keep their needy composers fed, for less than the cost of building a concert hall or running a symphony orchestra. Indeed, the wealthy “individualist” woman patron of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not often make huge donations on her own, in the

manner of Otto Kahn at the Metropolitan Opera or Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Edward J. De Coppet, the creator and sustainer of the Flonzaley Quartet. Some of this may have been, again, economic, in that even a wealthy woman such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney con-

trolled far less money than her husband. (The many concert halls named after

Patronage—and Women—1in Amenca’s Musial Life 39

women are generally of more recent vintage, the result, in large part, of family estates eventually reaching the hands of music-loving women.)

More typically, the “individualist” patron of the turn of the century opened her home to musical and artistic gatherings, in imitation perhaps of famed Euro-

pean salons; turn-of-the-century examples of musical salons included the homes, in Boston alone, of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the poet Amy Lowell, the painter Sara Choate Sears (whose husband Joshua Montgomery Sears was an amateur violinist and reportedly the wealthiest man in the city), Sarah Bull (widow of Ole Bull), and the composers Amy Beach and Clara Kathleen Rogers. To be fair, some men hosted musical soirées, too, such as the music critic Wiliam Foster Apthorp. Such “house concerts” became prominent toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the great American family fortunes first began to build up and when (as noted earlier) changes in various state legal codes permitted more and more women to manage and freely disburse their own money. “House concerts” form a whole hidden, because private, stream of high-level music making: Nellie Melba, Paderewski, and Fritz Kreisler were among the favored performers. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, in addition to sponsoring public concerts throughout the United States (and abroad), hosted more private ones in her splendid Pittsfield music room (see Chapter 6); analogous events took place in Blanche Walton’s house in New York (see Chapter 8). More recent and particularly imaginative are the performances and talks by a single composer such as John Cage or Steve Reich before an influential group of guests—each evening similar to the opening of a “one-artist show” in the art world—that Betty Freeman has mounted in her home in Los Angeles. (See Vignette B.) McCarthy’s other two categories of women’s organizations—“separatist” and “assimilationist’” —can also be seen in the efforts of women in American music, especially if one reinterprets these categories as being not discrete boxes but rather

two ends of a continuum. Linda Whitesitt has in several articles documented the work of women’s music clubs. ‘These clubs, at least originally, consisted of women gathering together to encourage one another to make (in this case) music at home

or at modest, semipublic recitals. ‘Thus, in their “separation,” they paralleled in origin and function various general-purpose women’s clubs and women-only societies for the decorative arts.°° Closely allied to these, but perhaps halfway along the continuum toward McCarthy’s third category, “assimilationism,” are the “women’s committees” of symphony orchestras, opera companies, and recital series. Ever since its inception under the intrepid Mrs. Belmont in the 1930s, for example, the Metropolitan Opera Guild has had one foot firmly in the separatist and the other in the assimilationist camp: the guild involves a group of women devoting much time to gathering smallish donations from a largish number of contributors (a typical feature of many “separatist” organizations in the arts), but these contributors include men as well as women (a feature more typical of “assimilationist” organizations). The Met Guild and the “symphony ladies” in every major (and many a minor)

40 CHAPTER 1: LOCKE AND BARR American city hold a position that may strike us as contradictory or as a latent source of tension. ‘They often raise—and raised, but for the moment we prefer the present tense—needed funds, and they encourage subscriptions (through various combinations of charm and guilt-inducing tactics, we are told). Nonetheless, the decision-making power remains vested in an all- or mostly male board of trustees

or guarantors. Such a division of labor at least has the advantage of relatively clear boundaries. (The “relatively” allows for many exceptions, especially in the past: an astutely observant novel by the music critic W. J. Henderson, The Soul of a Tenor, reports—and we see no reason to discount it—that women patrons of the opera in turn-of-the-century New York made meddlesome suggestions as to casting, costumes, and staging.)°’ More mysterious 1s the case of those women who, in full “assimilationist” fash-

ion, actually sit on such boards—an increasing number in recent decades—or who take part in joint (male and female) music clubs and organizations (an early example being the Macdowell Clubs in certain cities, such as New York, or the various Manuscript Clubs, such as the one organized by Mary Carr Moore in Los Angeles). An interesting study could surely be made, focusing on such questions as:

Do these women have different reasons for being active than the women on ‘ladies’ committees” and in women’s music clubs? ‘Io what extent are the same women—especially some of the most energetic and devoted—often active in all of these different sorts of organizations?®’ Is board membership the eventual reward for good work on the “ladies’ committee,” or are board members—female as well as male—chosen primarily for their financial clout and business connections? And are women, once they are allowed a place on mixed-gender institutional boards, granted the kinds of leadership opportunities and responsibilities that have long been part of the challenge of working in women-only groups?’ The challenges—and opportunities—of volunteer work on behalf of music are precisely the sorts of things that remain concealed by the unfortunate, if sometimes affectionately offered, stereotypes of women volunteers as silly geese in flowered hats. What Anne Firor Scott has discovered over and over again of women’s

aid-to-orphans associations and the like is no doubt equally true of these various music clubs and committees: through them, generations of women have “learned how to conduct business, carry on meetings, speak in public, manage money.””° Scott’s phrasing here is a touch categorical—many bourgeois women no doubt handled financial affairs in the home—but her main point holds. Indeed, some of the music clubs’ “organizational genius[es]”—as one club member described such reins-taking types in an address to the 1893 National Convention of Women’s Amateur Musical Clubs’!—went on to become music administrators and concert managers for pay, as musical life became more professional and bureaucratic. An early example 1s Adella Prentiss Hughes (fig. 1), a member of Cleveland’s Fortnightly Musical Club who turned the club into a major sponsoring agency of concerts by visiting soloists and orchestras and who eventually founded the Cleveland Orchestra (1918) and served as its much-respected manager until 1933. The

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Fig. 28. Miguel Covarrubias, “A Salon Recital of Modern Music: One of ‘Those Awesomely Elegant Evenings Which Society Has to Suffer—Seen by Covarrubias,” Vanity Far, February 1929, 54. The caption (Covarrubias’s own?) continues with a snide explication du texte: “In the forefront of mondaine [sc] musical circles is /. Pierre Paravent, the most recently imported Parisian pianist. Not to have heard Paravent is to be completely out of the present season. He has therefore been rented for the evening by Mrs. Bartow Blodgett, the monumental matron at left-center, for the entertainment of a number of tremendously important people. ‘This he is endeavouring to do by rendering a program of his own compositions, in which he specializes. ‘This is no stuff for weaklings and the auditors are taking it according to their several capabilities. The hostess is flanked by her daughter who is entranced by both the piece and the performer, and by her mother, Mrs. Holzderber, who is resting easily on her pearl dog-collar. In the center row, from left to right, are Horace Bankhead, critic, Lady Cragsmoor and lorgnette, Mrs. Dapper, wearing her famous Mona Lisa smile, and the young Camberwells who are plotting an escape. In the background two low-browed husbands are talking about the stock market while the host, at right, ponders grimly on the cost of all this noise Paravent produces.”

os4 CHAPTER 8: OJA “was not a dues paying organization, but... a pet project of two rich ladies who were constantly struggling over the leadership.””® Such stereotyped views do not, however, change the fact that women championed modernist music with gusto, freemg young composers to pursue their artistic

vision. ‘he work of these women was indispensable to the growth of American music in the 1920s, and it has had lasting implications. ‘foday, performance societies, including the League of Composers, continue to provide an essential forum for the newest pieces, and the idea of giving financial help to composers remains alive—although private benefactors, such as Betty Freeman in Los Angeles, now stand out as exceptional, while universities and foundations provide most of the support. Gertrude Whitney, Blanche Walton, Alma Wertheim, and Claire Reis, then, set an important precedent by dedicating themselves to the avant-garde. Their vigorous activism belongs not just to women’s history but helps explain how modern music came to be in America.

NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented as part of the Project for the Study of Women in Music at the Graduate Center of GUNY and at the 1991 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Chicago. Another version appeared in Modernism/ Modernity ( January 1997). Research has been aided by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University and a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies. Judith ‘Tick has been extraordinarily generous in suggesting sources and giving comments. [ am grateful to others as well, especially Adrienne Fried Block, Minna Lederman, Ralph Locke, Vivian Perlis, Gatherine Smith, Mark ‘Tucker, and Linda Whitesitt. ‘Throughout the notes, the following abbreviations are used for the location of manuscripts: DLC (Music Division of the Library of Congress) and NN (Music Division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center). The names of individual collections are abbreviated (e.g., “Antheil-DLC” refers to the George Antheil Collection at the Library of Congress). 1. Henry Cowell, “Introduction to the 1962 Edition,” in American Composers on American Musi, ed. Henry Cowell ({ Palo Alto:] Stanford University Press, 1933; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), x; Wilfrid Mellers, Muszc in a New Found Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1. 2. Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Scribner, 1926), 323.

3. Best known among modernist women composers during the 1920s were Ruth Crawford and Marion Bauer, and the three principal female editors of the day were Minna Lederman at Modern Music; Louise Varése, who assisted Carlos Salzedo at Eolian Renew and wrote program notes for the International Composers’ Guild; and Ely Jade (pseudonym for Germaine Schmitz) of Pro Musica Quarterly.

4. George Antheil to Mary Louise Curtis Bok, 7 July 1925, written from Paris, Antheil-DLC. 5. For more information, see K. H. Ruppel, “Die Prinzessin Edmond de Polignac,” Melos 34, no. 6 ( June 1967): 198-202. 6. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),

Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music — 255

147. The historian Dorothy Brown describes patronage in the 1920s as a “feminized” area, similar to teaching, social work, nursing, and librarianship (Dorothy Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s | Boston: ‘wayne, 1987], 151), and Minna Lederman concurs, observing that being a patron in the 1920s was “like tithing” (Lederman, interview with the author, 3 March 1988).

7. One of the few studies of music patronage in America is Richard Crawford, “Professions and Patronage I: ‘Teaching and Composing,” in The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 41-69. 8. Varése conducted only one concert by the orchestra in April 1919 and then resigned in the wake of a harsh critical response. A program for that concert, as well as a flier announcing the orchestra’s spring season, lists Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney among a group of four women who formed the “executive committee” (Program Collection, NN). g. Louise Varése, Varese: A Looking-Glass Diary, vol. 1: 1883-1928 (New York: Norton, 1972), 154.

10. Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 127. 11. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1904; reprint, New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 9. 12. B. H. Friedman, with the research collaboration of Flora Miller Irving, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 181. 13. After the first [GG concert in February 1922, Whitney hosted a party at the Whitney Club that was attended “by practically the entire audience,” and later there were parties for composers at the Whitney Club and at the home of Juliana Force, Whitney’s secretary and active liaison to artists; there were also luncheons at Whitney’s studio (Louise Varése, Varése, I: 172, 153).

14. See esp. ibid., 153-55 and 259; Friedman, 387, 4.05.

15. Whitney appears to have left only incomplete records of her philanthropy. ‘The painter John Sloan wrote of her in 1949: “No one will ever know the extent of the private benefactions Mrs. Whitney performed through Mrs. [ Juliana] Force. The records have been destroyed, probably at Mrs. Whitney’s request. But... I know of innumerable artists whose studio rent was paid, or pictures purchased just at the right time to keep the wolf from the door, or hospital expenses covered, or a trip to Europe made possible” (Sloan, in Juliana Force and American Art: A Memonal Exhibition, September 24—October 30, 1949 | New York:

Whitney Museum of American Art, 1949], 35-36). Whitney’s contribution as an art patron is evaluated in Roberta K. ‘Tarbell, “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney as Patron,” in The [iguratwe Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art, ed. Patricia Hulls and Roberta K. ‘Tar-

bell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), 11-22, 171-72, and in Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1991) 214-44.

16. Another of the guild’s patrons was Mrs. Christian Holmes, born Bettie Fleischmann and heir to the Fleischmann yeast fortune, who came to New York from Cincinnati around 1920. She had been head of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Orchestra (it was she who hired Leopold Stokowski as the Cincinnati Orchestra’s conductor in 1909). An article published in the Cincinnati Times Star after her estate was settled gives a rare view into the dimensions of one person’s patronage. Among the reported $20 million that Holmes gave away during her lifetime, $222,812 went to the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York, $158,118 to the National Music League, and $36,500 to the American National Opera Company. By contrast, her gifts to the guild must have been

256 CHAPTER 8: OJA too small to be reported (“Holmes Estate Is $7,836,623,” Crnconnate Times Star, December

23, 1947; clippings, Cincinnati Historical Society). Other information about Holmes comes from Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1982), 50-53. 17. The split between the guild and the league ostensibly came over whether or not the performance of Pierrot lunaire should be repeated after its American premiere (Varése opposed repeat performances, and those who eventually formed the league favored them). But a big power struggle was under way, principally between Varése and Claire Reis, and it left hard feelings on both sides. Probably because of this, Louise Varése gave little credit to Wertheim in writing the guild’s history. She mentions Wertheim only twice: as one of Claire Reis’s appointments to the guild’s executive board and as a host of guild meetings (Louise Varese, Varése, 1: 177, 185). In addition to her financial and administrative involvement in the guild, Wertheim wrote at least one article promoting its work: Wertheim, “World-Wide Guud of Composers,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 December 1922.

18. Alma’s first husband, Maurice Wertheim, owned a Wall Street investment firm and was a major patron of the Theatre Guild. Their marriage ended in 1929. A recent “family history” of the Morgenthaus continues the focus on males, noting that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had “real talent” as a singer, but that “a musical career was the last thing in the world [his father] had in mind for his only son. Music was all right, though, for the girls. Alma, one of my father’s three sisters, trained her voice to the edge of professionalism; later she

became a discriminating and demanding patron of avant garde composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Aaron Copland” (Henry Morgenthau HU, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History {| New York: ‘Vicknor & Fields, 1991], 240.) 19. Barbara Tuchman, letter to the author, 11 December 1987; Anne W. Werner, interview with the author, 21 February 1988.

20. Minna Lederman, editor of Modern Music, has said that Wertheim contributed $1,500 annually to the journal during the first few years of its existence (Lederman, interview with the author, 1 April 1989). 21. While New York composers tended to fall into separate ideological camps after the split between the guild and league, there was some overlap. For example, a letter from Carl Ruggles to Blanche Walton, written in 1926, shows that Wertheim continued to reach out to Ruggles, one of the IGG’s principal figures: “Curious: Dr. Bartlett forwarded a note from Mrs. Wertheim asking about me, and what I was doing, and I answered her a fortnight ago, but have received no reply” (Ruggles to Walton, postmarked 19 November 1926, Walton-NN). 22. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: rg00 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 112.

23. On Harris, see ibid., 129. “Mrs. Wertheim gave me $100 for Israel [Citkowitz],” Copland wrote to Nadia Boulanger on 19 December 1927 (Copland-DLC). 24. More about Wertheim and her support of Gos Cob Press can be found in Carol J. Oja, “Cos Cob Press and the American Composer,” Music Library Association Notes 45 (December 1988): 227-52. Wertheim’s obituary, “Mrs. Morgenthau, A Patron of Arts,” New York Times, 26 December 1953, is also informative. ‘Through their dedications, Gos Gob imprints suggest something of Wertheim’s patronage. Five scores were dedicated to her: Copland’s Piano Concerto, Gruenberg’s Jazz-Suite for Orchestra, Marion Bauer’s “Chromati-

con” from Four Piano Pieces, Roy Harris’s Concerto for Piano, Clarinet, and String Quartet, and Israel Citkowitz’s “Gentle Lady,” published in the Cos Cob Song Volume.

Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music 257 25. For a discussion of women publishers, see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1g00—1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 26. Lederman, letter to the author, 17 July 1988. 27. Claire Reis, interview with Vivian Perlis, 5 February 1976, Oral History / American Music, Yale University. Wertheim’s daughter, Anne Werner, recalls, too, however, that her mother’s income diminished after she divorced Maurice Wertheim in 1929. 28. Ruggles to Walton, 7 February 1928, Walton-NN.

29. Henry Cowell, “Program Note” for a concert honoring Blanche Walton, given at the New School for Social Research, 12 April 1959 (typescript in the collection of Mildred Baker, New York City). See also Richard Jackson, “Blanche Wetherill Walton,” in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 4 :474. 30. Walton, “Only a Sketch” (manuscript fragment of a memoir, n.d.), Walton-NN. 31. In rgo1, Walton’s husband Ernest was killed in a railway accident while commuting

between his job with De Coppet on Wall Street and their home in New Rochelle, but Blanche and De Coppet remained friends afterward. At the time of her husband’s death, she had two daughters—the younger was one year old and the elder was three. Only after raising them did she turn to patronage (Marion Walton Putnam, interview with the author, 19 April 1989, New York City). 32. Included in the Walton Collection are letters from the pianist Richard Buhlig and the composers Carlos Chavez, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Garl Ruggles, and Edgard Varese. 33. Walton’s gifts to the guild are documented in Varése to Walton, 8 December 1924, Walton-NN. 34. “The Founding of the Society,” AMS Bulletin 1 (1936): 1. 35. his is discussed by Judith ‘Tick in “Ruth Crawford—Modernist Pioneer,” in Ruth Crawtord, Music for Small Orchestra (1926) [and] Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Prano (1929), vol. 1 of Music of the United States of America (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1993), xxU—xxill.

36. This musicale is the topic of a letter from Copland to Walton. Since his “Trio” was to be among the featured compositions on the program, the musicale probably occurred after the completion of Vitebsk in 1929 (Copland to Walton, “Wed,” no date, Walton-NN). 37. Cowell, “Program Note.” 38. Louise Varése, Varése, 1: 153.

39. Waldo Frank to Claire Reis, 21 September 1956, Reis-NN (box 2). 40. According to Susan Noyes Platt (Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism [Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985]),

Katherine Dreier “assumed an aggressive, didactic attitude toward the endeavor of the So-

ciété Anonyme.” She was a “crusading spirit” who sought to “enlighten the unseeing masses who did not understand the new art because of their inability to see beyond externals” (8-9, 11). In 1923 Dreier published an influential treatise, Western Art and the New Era (New York: Brentano’s). 41. Reis discussed her potential for a concert career as part of a series of interviews conducted by Vivian Perlis, this one on 21 January 1976. ‘Tapes and a transcript are housed in Oral History / American Music at Yale University. This is an invaluable source, with the transcript running to some 300 pages. The quotation about charity is from Reis, “Outline” (undated typescript autobiographical statement), Reis-NN (box 1). Reis’s obituary, “Claire Raphael Reis Dies at 89; Leader in New York Cultural Life,” New York Times, 13 April 1978, also provides some biographical information.

256 CHAPTER 8: OJA 42. Born in Brownsville, Texas, to a Jewish family, Reis moved to New York with her mother, sister, and brother shortly after her father’s death in 1898. She first studied piano in France and Germany. “Notes on Contributors,” Eolzan Renew 2, no. 2 (March 1923): 28, accompanying an article by Reis, says she worked with ‘Tapper from 1908 to 1910. However, among Reis’s papers is a photograph of ‘Tapper, stating on the back that Reis studied with her from 1906 to 1913 (Reis-NN, box ta). ‘Tapper (1859~-1915) was an interesting figure in her own right. Born in Norway, she had studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Louis Maas, and was friends with Edvard Grieg, for whom she edited two volumes of piano compositions. Like many women, ‘lapper focused her career on nurturing others. A. Walter Kramer, editor of Musical America and another member of the circle that included ‘Tapper and Reis, noted this trait: “And so she

lived, for others, never for herself. ... I know that she composed much and that she destroyed it, never wishing to have her music appear in print” (A. Walter Kramer, “Bertha Fiering Lapper: Altruist [obituary],” Musical America 22 [25 September 1915]: 9). 43. Reis, interview with Perlis, 21 January 1976. 44. Waldo Frank, Memoirs of Waldo Frank, ed. Alan ‘Trachtenberg, introduction by Lewis Mumford ([Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 65. Since Frank describes Ornstein as “just back from overseas successes,” 1914 is a likely year for this event (undated by Frank); Ornstein had just returned to New York then after a highly acclaimed recital in

London. ‘There were other connections between Frank and Reis. His first wife was Margaret Naumburg, with whom Reis started the Walden School, and Reis’s husband Arthur, whom she married in 1915, was business advisor to Frank’s little magazine, The Seven Arts, which ran from 1916 to 1917. Arthur Reis was president of Robert Reis and Co., a firm established by his father, which manufactured men’s underwear. 45. Reis, interview with Perlis, 21 January 1976. 46. Programs for the recitals are in Reis-NN (box 2). They included works by Scriabin, Debussy, d’Indy, Schoenberg (Dre: Alavierstiicke, Op. 11), Ravel, Busoni, Casella, Cyril Scott, and Stravinsky (Piano Pieces of 1915). Ornstein also performed his own Meélancolie, Danse arabe, A la chinoise, Dwarf Suite, Sonata (1914), and The Masqueraders. 47. Paul Rosenfeld to Claire Reis, 16 August 1915, Reis-NN (box 2). 48. Reis, typescript resume dated 6 January 1952, Reis-NN (box 1). The date of the in-

ception of the People’s Music League appears to have been 1gi1. In Reis’s biography, included in “Notes on Contributors” (Folian Review 2, no. 2 [March 1923]: 28), it is given as that, also in several sets of typescript notes at Reis-NN (box 1). However, in one of her interviews with Vivian Perlis, Reis stated 1912 (21 January 1976), and Perlis gives that year in her article about Reis for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 4:28. As Reis tells it, her

founding of the People’s Music League came about under the aegis of Maurice Wertheim, husband of Alma Morgenthau, who gave her a letter of introduction to Frederic Howe of the People’s Institute. Mrs. Maurice Wertheim (Alma Morgenthau) became a member of the advisory council of the People’s Music League. 49. Reis, “Outline.” 50. The event took place on 12 February 1922. A program for it is in Reis-NN (box 2). 51. Reis, “Outline.” 52. Louise Varése, Varése, 1: 177, 186. Edgard Varése’s choice of the words “delicatessen parties” suggests anti-Semitism to me—a notion that Reis, however, later denied. Vivian Perlis asked her directly whether such bigotry had played a role in the split between the guild and league, especially since a substantial majority of those forming the latter group

Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Muste —-259

were Jewish, and Reis replied, “No, I definitely don’t think there was any anti-Semitism at all. [Carlos] Salzedo was a Jew, his best friend” (Reis, interview with Perlis, 29 January 1976). 53. First quotation: Reis, interview with Perlis, 29 January 1976. Second quotation: Reis, “Notes Added to Music” (undated typescript), Reis-NN (box 1). 54. Claire Reis, “Contemporary Music and ‘the Man on the Street,’” Lohan Renew 2, no. 2 (March 1923): 24, 27.

55. Jerome Hart, “Modern Music: Its Appreciators and Depreciators,” The Sackbut 4, no. 4 (November 1923): 102. Hart was a frequent contributor to The Freeman, a journal for which Daniel Gregory Mason also wrote (in fact he also discusses a contemporaneous article by Mason in this same piece), and his language in the Sackbut sounds similar to that of the critic Henry TT. Finck, suggesting a pattern of linking revolution, feminism, and modernist music: “Schonberg learned a lesson from the militant suffragettes. He was ignored till he began to smash parlor furniture [and] throw bombs” (“Schoenberg and the Suffragettes,” Musical Progress | New York: Harper & Bros., 1923], 393). The text of this excerpt is in turn very close to that of an unsigned review in the New York Post on 27 January 1914; Finck was then music critic for that paper. Connections between misogyny and modernist music are explored in Catherine Parsons Smith, “‘A Distinguishing Virility’: On Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music,

ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), go—106. 56. Reis discussed her connection with the Women’s City Club in an interview with Perlis, 6 May 1977. The Women’s City Club remains active today, and through it the mission of social feminism lives on. A 1990 pamphlet describes the group as “an activist organization,” which now focuses on issues such as dropout prevention in the schools, nuclear waste disposal, family planning and abortion rights, maternal and child health issues, and “sex equity for women in all walks of life.” 57. The historian Anne Firor Scott, in a study of “Women’s Voluntary Associations in the Forming of American Society,” has made an observation that applies directly to Reis, “In the first two decades of the twentieth century almost every woman who had attained a degree of visibility in local, state, or national affairs had either gotten her start in a voluntary association, been supported by one, or belonged to several for prudential reasons” (Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible, 282). One of the few studies of women’s music clubs

is by Linda Whitesitt, ““The Most Potent Force’ in American Music: The Role of Women’s Clubs in American Concert Life,” in The Musical Woman: An International Perspective, vol. 3, ed.

Judith Lang Zaimont (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), 663-81. 58. Other league board members who had defected from the guild included Stephan Bourgeois, Frederick Jacobi, Louis Gruenberg, Minna Lederman, and Alma Morgenthau Wertheim. 59. Aaron Copland, “Claire Reis (1889 [szc]—1978),” Musical Quarterly 64 (July 1978): 387.

60. Hilda Reis Byur, interview with the author, 16 November 1990, New York City. It is important to note that suffragists were not necessarily feminists. See Winnifred Harper, “The Younger Suffragists,” Harper’s Weekly 58 (27 September 1913): 7-8, discussed in June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1gro—1g20 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 26. 61. Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 19205, 34.. 62. Reis, interview with Vivian Perlis, 21 January 1976.

63. ‘The Philharmonic’s auxiliary had been founded during the 1921-22 season, although its roots reached back at least to 1909. See Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A Mistory

260 CHAPTER 8: OJA of New York’s Orchestra [New York: Doubleday, 1975], 207-8, 245. Reis herself joined the Philharmonic’s auxiliary board during its second year, but she later recalled, “I never felt that I was needed. But I did feel I was needed in the League, and therefore I had a greater sense of wanting to do what I could” (Reis, interview with Vivian Perlis, 3 March 1976).

In organizing the league’s auxiliary, however, Reis turned to some Philharmonic stalwarts, including especially Countess Mercati, chair of the league’s auxiliary, who had also

served on the executive committee for Varése’s New Symphony Orchestra (Louise Varése, Varése, 1: 140), and Mrs. Charles Guggenheimer—or Minnie Guggenheimer, as she was better known—who had not only had helped with Varése’s early orchestra but in 1918 also founded the famous Lewisohn Stadium Concerts, an inexpensive and popular summer series by the Philharmonic that she directed for some fifty years. See Sophie Guggenheimer Untermeyer and Alix Williamson, Mother Is Music (New York: Doubleday, 1960). 64. Varese, 1: 140.

65. Claire R. Reis, Composers, Conductors, and Cntics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; reprint, Detroit: Detroit Reprints in Music, 1974), 73. 66. Claire Reis, American Composers of Today (New York: International Society for Contemporary Music, U.S. Section, 1930); Reis, American Composers: A Record of Works Written Between 1912 and 1932, 2d ed. (New York: United States Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, 1932); Reis, Composers in America: Biographical Sketches of Living Composers

with a Record of Ther Works, 1912-1937 (New York: Macmillan, 1938); and Reis, Composers in America: Biographical Sketches of Contemporary Composers with a Record of Their Works, revised and

enlarged edition (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Reis’s other achievements include founding New York’s Walden School, a private school for children, in the 1910s; later she also played a prominent role in establishing the New York City Center. 67. Copland, “Claire Reis (1889 [szc]—1978),” and Cowell, “Program Note.” 68. Lederman, stated in a private conversation with the author. 69. Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: Norton, 1972), 130. The complexities of Ives’s attitude toward women are explored in Judith Tick’s “Charles Ives and the ‘Masculine’ Ideal,” in Musicology and Difference: Sexuality and Gender in Musical Scholarship,

ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 83-104. 70. Editorial, “Music and Manliness,” Musical Amenca (2 February 1924): 20; as cited by

Mary Herron DuPree in “The Failure of American Music: The Critical View from the 19208,” Journal of Musicology 2, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 311-12. Since many young composers

of the 1920s were homosexual, women did not present the only threat to “manliness.” Decades later, Louis Gruenberg would rue to Claire Reis, “I know I am in a perpetual stew and rage over my inability to transfer my feelings and impressions to paper, the sad state of music in America today since the politicians and homosexuals are dominating it” (letter, 1 December 1951, Reis-NN, box 2). 71. Nicolas Slonimsky, “The Patient, the Doctors, the Verdicts,” Boston Globe, undated clipping (probably January 1929), Slonimsky-DLC. This was a review of Paul Rosenfeld’s An Hour with American Music.

72. Rosenfeld, “Musical Chronicle: The New, or National, Symphony Orchestra,” The Dial 69 (December 1920): 670. 73. Paul Rosenfeld, “Thanks to the International Guild: A Musical Chronicle,” in By Way of Art (New York: Coward-McCann, 1928), 14. Rosenfeld’s statement, when coupled with ones such as the following, suggest that the league—at least occasionally—was perceived as

Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music —-261

being more lightweight than the guild. Perhaps having a leadership that was mostly female contributed to this attitude: “The league seems to entertain a rather good-humored, even indulgent, notion of its responsibilities to the public. In making up its programas, it favors music which is fanciful and entertaining, rather than that which is intellectual and uncompromising” (“Modern Music Guilds and Their Messages,” Christean Sceence Momtor, May 15, 1926, 16).

74. Copland, party list now attached to an undated letter (before 16 March 1930), “Monday,” Walton-NN. A page in a scrapbook compiled by Claire Reis even includes clippings for such events at her house, including “a companionable tea” for the Pro Arte Quartet, a reception for Frederick Jacobi, and “an amazing party” after a league concert. All are unidentified and undated (Reis-NN, box 1a). 75. Deems Taylor, “Music,” in Civilzzation in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Amencans,

ed. Harold E. Stearns (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 205-6. 76. W. J. Henderson, “The Modern Music Jag,” New Yorker, 21 February 1926, 21. This article is included among Claire Reis’s papers (Reis-NN, box 1). 77. Vanity Far 31 (February 1929): 54.

78. Jerome Moross to Catherine Parsons Smith, 20 July 1981. Quoted with Smith’s permission.

VIGNETTE I

The Power of Social Events Aaron Copland’s Guest List for a Post-Concert Reception Given by Blanche Walton

Annotated by Carol F. Oja

Sometime during the spring of 1930, Aaron Copland sent Blanche Walton a handwritten list of suggested guests for an after-concert party, presumably given at her New York apartment.! The list provides an unusual view of how the social events hosted by women helped composers build power bases. Although the document is undated, it was probably drawn up for a party after the Copland-Sessions concert on 13 April 1930. There were a number of Hungarians among the invitees—the Hungarian consul general, the violinist Leopold Auer, the violinist and composer Sandor Harmati—and the program that evening included three new Hungarian works, Istvan Szelényi’s Recitative, Pal Kadosa’s Sonatina, and Imre Weisshaus’s Piano Study. Walton may well have had a personal interest in these young Hungarians, perhaps through Béla Bartdk, who stayed with her during his 1927 visit to the United States. ‘The probability that the reception followed this April 1930 concert 1s further strengthened by the presence of the Polish violinist and composer Joseph Achron on the guest list, for the young Polish composer Jerzy Fitelberg’s Piano Sonata No. 2 appeared on the same program. Also performed were Roy Harris’s String Quartet and Israel Citkowitz’s Five Songs from “Chamber Music” by James Joyce and Sonatina for Piano.’

Copland and Roger Sessions had founded their concert series two years earlier “in the interests of the younger generation of American composers,” hoping to provide the same service for their contemporaries that the League of Composers offered to older Americans and Europeans.’ They also reached out occasionally to young composers abroad, especially in this particular 1930 program. Largely funded by Mary Senior Churchill, another of modernism’s unsung female supporters, the Copland-Sessions Concerts lasted for three years, giving eight programs in New York and one each in Paris and London. Copland’s choices for the party hosted by Walton reveal a shrewd political sense. ‘The guests included leaders of the League of Composers (Claire Reis and her husband, Arthur, as well as their co-founders Emerson Whithorne and Frederick Jacobi),* concert managers 262

The Power of Social Events —-263

(especially Arthur Judson and F.C. Coppicus, two of the most important of the day), and the press (especially the British critic and composer Leigh Henry and Robert Simon of the New Yorker). Other subtexts resonate from the list as well. For example, Citkowitz’s Five Songs,

which appeared on the April program, was published that same year by Alma Morgenthau Wertheim’s Cos Cob Press, and she appears on the party list, as does Whithorne, who in addition to his role in the league was one of her principal advisors.

NOTES

The Blanche Walton Collection in the Music Division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center is cited in these notes as Walton-NN. 1. The original is in Walton-NN. 2. It is also possible, however, that this party followed the previous concert on 16 March 1930, for an undated letter from Copland to Blanche Walton, now housed with the guest list in Walton-NN, states: “Our concert is scheduled for March 16, Sunday evening. I'll be able to send you a list of people to ask before the week 1s out. You might word it: ‘To meet composers and assisting artists after the C-S Concert” (n.d., written on stationery for the Copland-Sessions Concerts). 3. Beginning in November 1924, the League of Composers had given approximately

one concert per year of music by young Americans, although as the 1920s passed such works were increasingly integrated into its programs. ‘The quotation about the CoplandSessions Concerts comes from its manifesto, as found in its first program, “The CoplandSessions Concerts of Gontemporary Music” (22 April 1928), Walton-NN. For more information on the concert series, see Carol J. Oja, “The Copland-Sessions Concerts and ‘Their Reception in the Contemporary Press,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 212-29. 4. It is interesting that Copland felt the need to identify Jacobi to Walton as an “American composer,” suggesting that her world and Jacobi’s were quite separate. Copland also misspelled the name of ‘Temple Emanu-El, the famous Reform synagogue.

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NINE

Culture, Feminism, and the Sacred Sophie Drinker’s Musical Activism Ruth A. Sole Ln our cwilrzation women are so far devitalized by the long suppression of their real inner life and its voice in music that they do not even know why they are still not in the night relation to music. SOPHIE DRINKER, MUSIC AND WOMEN

In 1965, near the end of her life, Sophie Hutchinson Drinker wrote a memoir for her children and their descendants. The final chapter describes her busy schedule, even in her seventies, as a writer and popular lecturer. Of these activities she says, “My theme is ever the same: the repression of women by the patriarchal culture pattern.”! This view, from the Olympian perspective of her last years, sums up a life’s work that would, I think, have surprised a younger Sophie. The intellectual course that her life took, and the work that she did, seem startling for someone of her particular background and upbringing, so they pose interesting questions for students of the vagaries of culture. What would have been more likely for her, a woman of high social standing and comfortable means with a particular devotion to music, was a career dedicated to the familiar sort of artistic patronage. The direct sponsorship of some musical institution or one or more individual composers, or the explicit commissioning of musical compositions, would have given her, as it gave Elizabeth Coolidge and Isabella Gardner, an active role in the production of new music and in the tending of the high-culture mainstream. But Sophie Drinker took a different route. Her patronage—or “matronage,”’ as she would surely have preferred us to say——encouraged ordinary people, especially women, to participate in music making; she underwrote a lifelong campaign to inform the wider world about women’s roles in the history of culture and to persuade modern women to reclaim those roles. Many of her projects originated in partnership with her husband Henry, also a dedicated musical amateur; I shall shortly describe the family’s extensive involvement in and sponsorship of musical activities. But Sophie also branched out on her own; with the research she did for her best-known book, Music and Women, she was launched into a more radical trajectory than typical bourgeois amateur music making would have led anyone to expect.’ It eventually took her beyond the field of music into religion, history, and politics; she ended with a strongly feminist vi266

Culture, Feminism, and the Sacred — 267

sion and a well-developed theory of patriarchal culture—an extraordinary achievement for any woman in 1948, but an astonishing one for someone situated as she was.

Sophie Hutchinson was born in 1888, into a condition as near to hereditary aristocracy as is possible in the United States; her forebears had, as she remarks in her memoir, “played a conspicuous part in the life of Philadelphia” since the seventeenth century, and when in later life she joined the Colonial Dames, she found that she “could fill the admission requirements many times.”’ Her family was not remarkably wealthy, but Sophie and her siblings had a thoroughly genteel upbringing, with nursemaids, finishing schools, and coming-out parties; her sister-inlaw Catherine Drinker Bowen later described her as “cousin to half of well-bred Philadelphia.”* Sophie notes that she had piano lessons as a child, could sight-read well, and practiced on “Mamma ’s upright piano . . . by the hour.” But she nonetheless disparages her own early musical education, assessing it from the later perspective of the Drinkers’ full-blown philosophy of music training: “At that time, group singing in school was unheard of and the idea that one’s ear and sense of rhythm could be developed by singing had not yet influenced music education.” After graduating from St. Timothy’s School in Maryland, Sophie decided against college, although she had been admitted to Bryn Mawr: a sure mark of the distance between her adolescent and mature selves. No bluestocking, she maintained that neither she nor her parents ever thought of her going to college, although the 77-year-

old author of the memoir observed later that it “would have suited me far better than the attempt [at] being a debutante.”® But this recognition was a long time coming, and for many years her references to her missed college education have just a tinge of the sour grape. In 1927, at the age of thirty-nine, she wrote in her diary that she sometimes wondered “whether it is not the refinement of cruelty to send poor innocent girls to college & train them to believe that they can have careers & ‘express themselves’—& then marry them to some nice unsuspecting man who is trying to do the same thing himself, and expect the girl to completely re-orientate herself”’ One of the preoccupying questions for anyone who studies Sophie Drinker is her ambiguous understanding of social class: as the remainder of this essay will reveal, attempts to match her published writing to her private life bring to light a persistent tension between egalitarian assertions and the assumption of privilege. Nor does she seem to have thought very deeply about the complex interactions of class and gender even as she herself experienced them. Drinker’s description of this period in her life is perfectly characteristic: I cannot condemn too harshly the customs for girls of my set at the time I grew up. The idea that a girl’s place was in the home helping her mother was too limiting, since there was nothing to do at home. Manufacturing had long since gone to factories out of the home and servants did the household chores. I had no training in any-

268 CHAPTER 9: SOLIE thing at home or outside in the business world, such as girls have now. All I could do was to play tennis very feebly and the piano very poorly.®

While she clearly identifies her entrapment as a daughter, she makes no comment about the leisure time provided for her by those servants. In any event, for five years after her graduation from finishing school, she endured the stifling life of a “young lady” at home with her mother, a life enlivened only by parties and by participation in the expected round of volunteer social service activities, before she met and married Harry Drinker (fig. 30). The Drinker family was similar to Sophie’s own in terms of its history—the

memoir traces connections between them dating to a time before the Revolution—although it was understood to be somewhat lower on the social scale, having originally been Quaker.’ Although Harry and Sophie began their married life in 1911 on the proverbial newlyweds’ shoestring, they were living extremely well by the time their five children were growing up, with several live-in servants and a brand-new, large, and well-appointed house on the “Main Line” in Merion. But a feature of their backgrounds just as important as wealth, it seems to me, is the striking sense of entzlement, no doubt a product of what used to be called “breeding,” that marked all their activities. It was this almost inexhaustible self-possession that permitted both of them to assume commanding roles in a musical world in which, after all, neither of them had anything approaching serious training. Harry brought with him into the marriage the Drinker family temperament— boisterous, emotional, and hyperactive—and his own passionate, almost excessive, love of music. By all accounts he was equally passionate about his professional calling, the law, but various family documents portray him, from a very young age, as nearly always at the keyboard when he was at home. He loved to play chamber music, first with his youngest sister, Catherine, then with Sophie and their children; at various times in their lives, both Sophie and Harry were known to hire musicians, from the Curtis Institute or from the Philadelphia Orchestra, to play with them. Once, living away from home during an extended court case, Harry had a rented piano brought to his hotel room. One of the many curiosities about them as a couple is the unusual position Harry Drinker seems to have negotiated vis-a-vis the vivid gender-typing of this just post- Victorian generation. He was unperturbed by the feminine associations that music then carried in American culture, sharing his emotional response to it with all who would listen; like all the Drinker men, he was known to weep under the influence of strong emotion (Sophie, made of sterner stuff, detested “sentimentality”).!° Perhaps in compensation, Harry also devoted considerable amounts of time to hunting, shark fishing, log

splitting, and a general frenzy of masculine physical activity redolent of the “strenuous life” that had been prescribed in ‘Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1899 speech.!!

The Drinkers’ household was musical from the start; indeed, four-hand piano playing had formed a significant part of their courtship and continued for many

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