WOMEN IN MUSICAL AFFAIRS
In Europe music sprang from the ground and it is the folk-songs and folk-dances of the peasant that have gradually—refined and developed in the hands of the great composers—worked their way upward and become the possession and delight of the cultured classes.
In this country we have no peasantry, and what slight remains of folk-songs and folk-dances we possess, apart from the music of the negro, have only recently been dug out of the isolated mountain fastnesses of Kentucky and Tennessee. These are generally of British origin and cannot be considered as having been part and parcel of our national life. As against the rich subsoil of the folk-songs of Germany, Bohemia, Russia, France, and Scotland we can show but the thinnest artificial layer of music, and this has been created and carefully nurtured by a small educated class.
The dreary social life of the early Puritan settlers and their frowning attitude toward the joys of life further retarded the growth of the arts among us.
I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America.
Musical education began among the well-to-do classes who could afford to engage the European musicians who immigrated to America to teach their daughters—but not, alas, their sons. A strong feeling existed that music was essentially an effeminate art, and that its cultivation by a man took away that much from his manliness and, above all, made him unfit to worship at the most sacred shrine of business. I am speaking now of fifty years ago. Conditions have improved since that time, but not sufficiently as yet to produce normal and healthy conditions regarding the civilization of our people.
Women’s musical clubs began to form in many a village, town, and city, and these clubs became the active and efficient nucleus of the entire musical life of the community, but, alas, again principally the feminine community. It is to these women’s clubs that the managers turn for fat guarantees for appearances of their artists, and it is before audiences of whom seventy-five per cent are women that these artists disport themselves.
The result of this has been that the cultural life of American women has often been absolutely a thing apart from their relations with their men-folk. It has become accepted that of course men do not and need not share the women’s interest in the arts; and while business does not perhaps monopolize the American man in quite as unhealthy a fashion as in former years, the principal change which has been brought about is the introduction of golf, at least an occupation in which men and women may share. What a pity that the elusive ball is not composed of a little Beethoven and Brahms instead of the mysterious mixture of concrete and gutta-percha, and that family life, which is the very fortress of civilization, cannot make use of the cultivation of music as one of the strongest ties to bind husband and wife, sons and daughters together!
Some of us are too prone to look upon modern plumbing, telephones, and motor-cars as evidences of high civilization or even culture, when they are really only more or less agreeable conveniences which minister to our comfort but not to our heart or head.
In Europe men and women share more equally in the love and cultivation of music, and the emotional and personal attitude of the women is offset by the more impersonal and mental attitude of the men. The result of this is shown in audiences in which neither sex predominates and, above all, in the cultivation of chamber-music at home in which professionals and amateurs, men and women, participate to their mutual pleasure and development. Nothing more charming can be imagined than such family evenings of music, during which the players indulge themselves in the string quartets and piano trios of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, with perhaps a small audience of enthusiasts composed of other members of the family and half a dozen friends who afterward all join in a jolly supper of bread and cold meats, together with a good bottle of wine or beer.
My father carried this lovely custom into the New World, and I owe almost my entire education in chamber-music to the Sunday afternoons at his house, the tranquil and spiritual atmosphere of which is unforgettable.
A few years ago a meeting was held in the mayor’s office at City Hall at which I had been asked to speak in behalf of good music for the people on Sunday afternoons and evenings. A clergyman from Brooklyn had made a tremendous appeal against any Sunday recreations and wanted the aldermen to revive the old blue laws of two hundred years ago. The room was crowded with people, and when I spoke of what the chamber-music on Sunday afternoons at my father’s house had meant to me as a boy, this audience broke into such enthusiastic applause that there was no mistaking the general attitude, and my Sunday symphony concerts, which I was the first to inaugurate in New York, have only once been interfered with by municipal authorities.
Some American women have realized the false and one-sided condition of musical culture in our country and have sought to remedy it by encouraging their sons to take up the study of some musical instrument, but it has been up-hill work, as the general sentiment of the country has not yet been sufficiently awakened. Plato considered the study and appreciation of music an educational necessity for the young Athenian, but such schools as Groton, Saint Paul’s, and Saint Mark’s, for instance, have not yet admitted music to their regular curriculum, and in so far as it is studied there it is considered rather an outside privilege with which the school course has no official connection. Among the boys the necessity for excelling in football or baseball is so carefully and consistently insisted upon that almost the entire time left from school hours is devoted to these sports, and the boy who wants to continue the study of a musical instrument, which a fond mother has perhaps begun with him before he entered the school, is looked upon by the other boys as a sissy. The standard of personal conduct set in these schools is high, but the tendency seems to be to make the boys as like each other as possible. Many of them, if not discouraged, would develop decided artistic talent, but individuality and independence of thinking, which should be the end and aim of all teaching, is often frowned upon, and the results only contribute still further to the monotony of our social life, in which the courage to be one’s self is submerged in the desire to be exactly like every one else.
The public schools of our country, however, show a much more intelligent attitude than formerly; and, while the time allowed for singing and the study of the beginnings of music is still all too short, music is taught to the boys as well as to the girls. The singing of the children has greatly improved, and in many cities school orchestras have been formed, which the boys and girls enjoy immensely and in many of which music of good character is studied.
In Los Angeles and Berkeley, California, I heard some excellent school orchestras, and in Dayton, Ohio, Mrs. Talbot has interested herself personally in this movement with great enthusiasm and excellent results.
In New York, my brother Frank, while supervisor of music in the public schools, effected a complete reform in the teaching of the children and succeeded in interesting the authorities to give music a more important position. The singing improved immensely and since his retirement Mr. Gartlan, his successor, has continued the good work. I have several times used choruses of a thousand school children at the music festivals of the Oratorio Society in the production of such works as Pierné’s exquisite “The Crusade of the Children” and “The Children of Bethlehem,” and the children sang the three-part harmonies of their music with such purity and exquisite quality of tone as to bring happy tears to the eyes of the audience.
School orchestras have been formed all over the city, and once a year I take my entire orchestra to one of the large auditoriums of the public high schools and for two thousand little would-be orchestra musicians we play a programme composed of the music they have been studying during the winter. We never play before a more enthusiastic and delightful audience.
Thirty-one years ago I gave the first orchestral concert for children, and twenty-five years ago my brother Frank founded the Young People’s Symphony Concerts, which were designed to introduce the beauties of orchestral music to children, and in a short explanatory talk to unravel its mysteries of construction and demonstrate the tone colors of the different instruments of the orchestra. These concerts have proved an enormous success and of great importance for the education of the coming generation. When my brother retired from public work in order to devote himself exclusively to the direction of the Institute of Musical Art I took over these concerts, and have since added another course intended exclusively for little children from seven to twelve years of age. The audiences are truly remarkable. The faces of the children are aglow with interest and excitement, and when I sit down at the piano after playing an overture with the orchestra and, repeating some melodic phrase from it, ask them, “Which instrument played this melody?” their little voices ring out from all over the hall in high, shrill accents, like little pistol-shots, “The oboe! The oboe! The trumpet!” Then I let all those who think it was the oboe raise their hands, and if they are right great is their triumph, and if they are wrong equally great is their chagrin. Generally they are right!
On my orchestral tours I have several times given such children’s concerts on the afternoon preceding the regular evening symphony, and while two such concerts in one day are a great exertion, the children’s especially demanding a great output of vitality in order to keep their interest, I have felt more than repaid by the results; in many of the cities my work in this direction has been continued by the local orchestras or musical clubs (again the women!), and with the happiest results.
In New York also women devoted to music have greatly contributed toward its development, but occasionally the result of their efforts has not been so beneficial. Not so long ago a handsome but incompetent foreign musician (I will not disclose any name or dates in this story) came to New York and enlisted the sympathies of a few enthusiastic women. As many women need some personality on which to centre their devotion to art, they decided that New York should have this particular gentleman to direct its symphonic future. The American business man is proverbially good-natured to his womenkind and ready to pour out money for music provided he is not compelled to listen to it, and so these ladies gathered a huge fund with which to give a series of orchestral concerts. The amount was large enough to maintain a good symphony orchestra in proper hands for an entire winter, but in this instance was to be expended on six concerts only. The handsome young foreigner gave his first concert, which was a failure so complete and dismal—he being not only without any reputation but with hardly any experience in work of this kind—that even his little group of adorers became appalled and proposed to cancel the rest of the concerts. One lady, however, who had her own special favorite conductor, suggested that a complete disgrace might be averted if her protégé were invited to conduct the remaining concerts. As he was an excellent artist and thoroughly routined in the handling of orchestral players the results were so good and, above all, such a contrast to the dire tragedy of the first concert that the enthusiastic lady devotee saw her opportunity and suggested that a new orchestra should be formed for the following winter, the concerts of which should be conducted by the man who had saved the situation for them. New York had already an average during the winter of a hundred and fifty symphonic concerts by the New York Philharmonic, the New York Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it would seem from this that the symphonic needs of our public were already more than amply supplied; but an enthusiastic woman, especially when driven by devotion for some pet artist, refuses to recognize practical conditions, and so this little group proceeded to gather more funds, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, in order to put the new orchestra properly on its feet.
Their first difficulty was to find good players. There are never very many first-class symphonic players to be found. Not only do the two old-established New York orchestras employ about a hundred players each, but the orchestras of other cities come to New York to fill their vacancies. For years the Philharmonic, the New York Symphony, and other out-of-town orchestras had a gentleman’s agreement that they would not steal each other’s players, but this new organization immediately proceeded to take thirty-seven from the Philharmonic by offering them immensely higher salaries. They did not take a single player from the New York Symphony Orchestra because, as they vowed, of their great personal respect for me, but I think it was partly because we happened to have a two-year contract with all our men which bound them to us very effectively for another season. They filled their ranks further from members of the Boston Orchestra and from other out-of-town organizations, and then proceeded on their first regular season as a New York Orchestra with loud protestations that New York at last had an organization worthy of the metropolis. This orchestra carried on its existence for two years, at the end of which it came to a dismal close with an expenditure for the three seasons over and above the receipts of the box-office of nearly a million dollars, which their surprised and chagrined men guarantors had to pay. This is but one of several such irregular ventures, each one of which has swallowed hundreds of thousands. One would think that the inevitable failure of these efforts would deter others from undertaking them, but such is not the case. Hope springs eternal in the breast of the musical woman devotee and I have just heard of a new orchestra now being formed in order to enable still another foreigner, whose interpretations will of course be a revelation to our public, to wield his stick in this country as his own has refused to accept him at his own valuation.
In recent years chamber-music in New York has received great encouragement and intelligent support from women. Mrs. Frederick S. Coolidge has proved a veritable godmother to this lovely branch of musical art, and every fall the festivals of chamber-music which she gives in Pittsfield in the Berkshire Hills bring together notable gatherings of musicians and music lovers as her guests. For several years she has offered generous prizes in competition for various forms of chamber-music. But to me the most encouraging thing that she has done is the commissioning of certain composers to write compositions for these festivals. Neither string quartets nor violin sonatas can ever become profitable to the composer in the ordinary way of commerce, as the number of copies which can be sold of such works is necessarily limited. Even young American composers must live, and if they are to devote their time to the creation of serious forms of art they should be assured of at least some financial recompense for the time they must give to it.
Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer has entirely maintained an excellent string quartet for the past three years, and I should like to see such excellent examples followed by others among our well-to-do, as chamber-music is essentially written for performance in the home and loses much of its charm and intimacy if given in a larger hall and before hundreds of people.
For some time to come the initiative for a more general musical education of our people will have to come from the women. If American mothers will demand and obtain for their sons the same musical privileges and opportunities which their daughters now enjoy America will speedily become the most musical country in the world.
So much has already been done, but much remains, and I should like to live a hundred years longer just to watch this development and to rejoice in its results.