Mabel Daniels: An American Composer in Transition

Maryann McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317102939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Mabel Daniels (1877–1971): An American Composer in Transition assesses Daniels within the context of American music of the first half of the twentieth century. Daniels wrote fresh sounding works that were performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles during her lifetime but her works have only recently begun to be performed again. The book explains why works by Daniels and other women composers fell out of favor and argues for their performance today. This study of Daniels's life and works evinces transition in women's roles in composition, the professionalization of women composers, and the role that Daniels played in the institutionalization of American art music. Daniels's dual role as a patron-composer is unique and expressive of her transitional status.

1 Introduction

Like her New England contemporary and acquaintance, composer Amy Beach,¹ Mabel Daniels composed works that were performed extensively in her day and were acclaimed for their artistic excellence.² Daniels’s long life was marked by substantial achievements and it constitutes a portrait of her times. Born in 1877 north of Boston in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Daniels resided in Boston or its environs until her death in 1971.³ Unlike the work of Amy Beach, however, Mabel Daniels’s compositions are today much less known.

In the past, Daniels’s compositions were performed and appreciated. One of Daniels’s compositions was featured in a program celebrating “American Composers’ Day” at the Pan-American Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915. Conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Munch led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in performances of her large-scale choral and orchestral works.⁴ Professional choral and chamber groups and symphony orchestras, among them the New York Philharmonic and the Imperial Philharmonic Orchestra of Tokyo, performed and recorded her works.⁵ In 1966, composer Randall Thompson praised Daniels at the dedication of a Radcliffe College dormitory named in her honor. Thompson highlighted her “intellectual curiosity,” “tireless pursuit of excellence,” and “gift of song,” qualities he suggested resulted from a complex mixture of the composer’s talent and nurturance at Radcliffe College.⁶

While Daniels’s body of work demonstrates the absorption of diverse influences that were available to her, it fundamentally reflects the solid foundation that she acquired while a student at Radcliffe and in Germany. Her works’ stylistic features include the choral medium, regular phrase structure, and third-related chords. In her instrumental and large-scale choral works, Daniels faced head on the problem of maintaining a continuous structure while testing the possibilities of Impressionism and Neoclassicism.⁷ She began using harmony as expressive surface color in her earlier and small-scale vocal works and increasingly employed it in later compositions as a way of expanding their forms. She also experimented by combining modal- and quartal-chord structures with full triads in novel ways. Her works are predominantly vocal and in these she shows her sensitive and imaginative response to words through her use of musical means to create atmosphere and drama.⁸ Yet, creating atmosphere and drama were also goals in her instrumental work.

Mabel Daniels succeeded in meeting the challenge of composing works that are fresh sounding, well written and spaced for voices, and very skillfully scored. She accomplished this feat by constructing her own style while possibly internalizing specific works and general styles of other composers, among them Lili Boulanger, Claude Debussy, Roy Harris, Paul Hindemith, and Erik Satie. Clearly, the stylistic variety of Daniels’s work displays her versatility. Her authenticity as a composer can be defined by the way that she worked with available resources. In its scope, Daniels’s work produced a significantly rich tapestry from among the many stylistic threads that were representative of American art music prior to 1950. As such, the body of work represents one individual’s path to becoming an American composer during the first half of the twentieth century, and how this work contributed to the making of an American music. Daniels, however, was also an American composer who happened to be a woman, which, given the tradition of excluding women composers from historical accounts, made her path more eventful and important and worth examining.

Like Beach, Daniels secured American women’s position in composition at a time when women did not generally compose and perform serious concert music. Both composers, along with Margaret Ruthven Lang, daughter of the conductor Benjamin Lang, and Helen Hopekirk were the first four American women to have compositions performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Daniels was the last of the group to have works performed by this orchestra, and it would be about another fifty years before the Boston Symphony Orchestra would present another work by a woman composer.⁹

The locale and times were auspicious for the success of these composers and of their earlier contemporary, the singer and composer Clara Rogers. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, Boston was a city of unprecedented opportunity for women on a variety of fronts, including music.¹⁰ The Woman Question had affirmed women’s equality with men in a range of areas. It had also challenged the evolutionary idea that women were inferior to men and subject to firmly fixed social roles and expectations.¹¹ Suffrage was also on the horizon and expressive of women’s newly found feelings of entitlement to rights and opportunity.¹² Higher education became increasingly available to women and prepared them to enter the professions.¹³ The establishment of new cultural institutions, an influx of foreign, largely German-speaking, musicians, and the networks of clubs with musically active members expanded opportunities for performance.¹⁴ Boston, thus, was a city that developed, supported, and appreciated its composers, male and female. Significantly, Boston can also be credited as the site for the first and best-known group of women composers to regard themselves as professionals.¹⁵

Beach and Daniels, however, traveled different paths to establish their respective places in American composition. From Beach to Daniels, we see an expansion in opportunity for American women composers and a relaxation of prescribed gender expectations. The contributions of both women are consequently important to the history of American women in composition.

Beach achieved renown as the first successful and praiseworthy American woman composer by her prodigious talent and hard work. Restrictive roles for women who shared Beach’s upper-class standing (by way of marriage) included mores that opposed women performing in public for personal financial gain. In Beach’s case, these traditions influenced her change of career early on from pianist to composer.¹⁶ Both before and after her marriage to the prominent surgeon Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, who was twenty-four years older, Amy Beach held professional aspirations that seemed predetermined by fixed social constraints. Prior to marriage, Amy Beach was not allowed to study piano abroad. Instead, she studied privately in Boston. After marriage, her husband expected his young bride to give up public performance even though she was a prodigious pianist. While he encouraged her to compose, he wanted her to develop exclusively through self-study. It was only after Dr. Beach’s death in 1910 and her mother’s death in early 1911 that Beach finally journeyed abroad to perform publicly.¹⁷

Mabel Daniels was born some ten years later than Beach. Privileged, Daniels was a member of the upper-middle class, which, together with her family’s musical and cultural connections, made access to a professional career much easier. An alumna of Radcliffe College, Class of 1900, Daniels was among the first American women composers to be trained at an educational institution, which today is the customary path of study. She used her connections with the college and with women’s associations to compose solo songs, choruses, and operettas designed for university ensembles. Being a fine singer, she performed in her operettas and supplied her own orchestrations. At different times, Daniels also conducted her works. Ambitious and determined, she set an example for her female successors.

Mabel Daniels is an intriguing example of a woman composer who developed and maintained her professional career and was concerned about preserving it for posterity. It is no accident that she discovered her calling while at Radcliffe. Her college years show how the social avenues that were available to the women of her era became increasingly the public and strategic means of forging professional selves.

One activity at the college was composing and performing operettas. What compelled Radcliffe women to write and perform these works was an interest in raising money for the college and aiding charities and social causes beyond the ivy walls, such as local settlement houses, hospitals, reading rooms, and child welfare funds. This activity reflected the concurrent movement of domestic feminism and its progressivist ideals.¹⁸ Through roles previously associated with the context of the private sphere of the home, women began to make their mark in the public sphere using creative means through which they could better society. While the impetus for writing and performing the music was volunteering and charity, this benevolent motivation placed women at the threshold of professionalism. Volunteering and fundraising gave women opportunities to gain experience in composing and performing, should they desire to apply this experience professionally. However, most Radcliffe women at that time did not cross that threshold. Mabel Daniels did. She fulfilled her social class and culturally defined womanly obligation of serving social causes, but she came to identify herself as a composer and gain exposure and experience in the field.

The title “professional composer” was not typically applied to women of Mabel Daniels’s generation. In Daniels’s era, it was not regarded as socially proper for a woman, especially one of Daniels’s social status, to earn money from her musical activities. That Mabel Daniels was compensated for some of these activities provides a lens through which to view retrospectively women’s development as composers from the early years of the twentieth century to the present. Marcia Citron argues that the term professional composer, if not typically used to describe them, does apply to women of this time frame. She distinguishes between a woman’s expectations of herself as a professional and society’s expectations of her. For Citron, the meaning of professional extends beyond payment for what one does to include some “expectation of success” and “… some combination of career advancement, critical acclaim, public acknowledgement, commercial reward, and personal satisfaction.”¹⁹ Clearly, Citron’s broadened definition of the term professional composer seems to match the view that Daniels held of herself.

After Radcliffe, Mabel Daniels spent about a year studying orchestration with composer George Chadwick, who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. A year later, she furthered her career with academic training in Germany, becoming the first woman to enroll in a higher theoretical course at the Royal Conservatory in Munich. In 1886, only a decade and a half before, Daniels’s older contemporary Margaret Ruthven Lang had studied violin, counterpoint, and fugue with professors from the conservatory, but she was not allowed to enroll for study there because of her gender.²⁰ Daniels set a precedent for women in 1902 at the Conservatory, where she arrived, with letter in hand to enter a music score reading class, at a place that, prior to her enrollment, had been exclusively a male preserve. She complemented these studies at the conservatory with composition and voice classes. In her diary-travelogue that resulted from her European travels, An American Girl in Munich: Impressions of a Music Student (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1905), she expressed her determination to be admitted to the score reading class. In describing the director’s prejudice against women who sought training in the more theoretical subjects, Daniels also showed her entertaining sense of humor and pluck.

Instead of writing a conventional diary-travelogue during her 1902–1903 sojourn, Daniels wrote about her professional exploits and her studies, described musical personalities, and critiqued operatic performances. Using a hybrid genre of travelogue and diary—genres that have been themselves important vehicles for women’s self-discovery—Daniels defined herself as a professional composer through her published book.²¹ Women were defining themselves by writing concurrently in an array of other fields, including piano performance, journalism, and missionary work. The broadening scope of women’s professionalism at the time is of great significance historically, and musicologists who deal with gender have featured excerpts of her book in their histories and anthologies.²²

As one of the five most visible and active Boston women composers in this period, Daniels is important to the development of American art music. She maintained relationships of varying degrees of closeness with the four women composers. While all four women were of an earlier generation than she was—both socially and professionally—their careers overlapped with hers to differing extents.²³ Daniels was also heir to the Second New England School and carried the torch in her own way to the next generation of composers.²⁴ She absorbed the teaching of her Harvard mentors and later honed her skill in orchestration through private study with Chadwick. In Munich, she pursued theory and composition at the Royal Conservatory with Ludwig Thuille, who had been Chadwick’s fellow student there under Josef Rheinberger’s tutelage. While Daniels lacked a professional academic post in composition, which was available to the many male composers she knew, she had other advantages. Her family had contacts with important male composers and musicians who were associated with Boston’s musical institutions. The relationships that she later formed on her own with these musicians helped her professionally and make her an especially important link among the Boston women composers, the composers of the Second New England School, and the subsequent generation of American composers.²⁵

Another resource for Daniels was the M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of music examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Daniels’s life
• 3 A composer in the making: Radcliffe
• 4 A composer in the making: Munich
• 5 Composing in a changing world
• 6 Some characteristics of Daniels’s work
• 7 Beginnings
• 8 Daniels’s mature works
• 9 The Song of Jael: a synthesis
• 10 Daniels’s place in American composition
• Bibliography
• Index