Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

Part One: Nature as a Summer Home: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma

Part one Nature as a Summer Home amy Beach, marion Bauer, Louise taLma � The first three composers considered in this study–Amy Beach (1867–1944), Marion Bauer (1882–1955), and Louise Talma (1906–1996)–were born four decades and thousands of miles apart: Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire; Bauer in Walla Walla, Washington; and Talma in Arcachon, France–she settled in New York City when she was quite young. Beach, the oldest, was thirty-nine years Talma’s senior and represents a completely different generation; however, all three women shared the common experience of multiple summers spent at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The artists’ retreat was conceived by Marian and Edward MacDowell in 1907 and made a reality by the unstinting efforts of Marian over a period of a half century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the colony was a unique place for women musicians, artists, and writers to enjoy being among other professionals of their sex. In addition, at a time when uninterrupted, lengthy, solitary encounters with the natural world beyond one’s local environs were still rare occurrences for the majority of women, the MacDowell, located deep in the New Hampshire woods and requiring at least a day’s travel for most colonists to reach, provided a safe, quiet, bucolic escape and an opportunity to engage with nature in ways denied them in their more urban and busy lives. Unmediated access to all of nature remained an elusive experience for women in the early years of the twentieth century, as it had been for Margaret Fuller in 1843. 26 Nature as a Summer Home Beach’s residencies at the colony began in 1921 and continued until 1941; she went there each year except 1939, when it was closed because of damage done by a hurricane the previous September. Marion Bauer visited MacDowell twelve times between 1919 and 1944, and Louise Talma broke all records for numbers of residencies, forty-three in all, between 1943 and 1995. As the colony has grown in reputation and desirability, recurring residencies of the types enjoyed by Beach, Bauer, and Talma are no longer available; the semipermanent summer home-away-from-home, as it became for Beach and Talma, is no longer an option. But the place continues to nourish creativity even with more limited visits. The sights and sounds of the MacDowell Colony inspired specific works of all three composers as they would other artists who captured it in photographs and paintings, and writers who wove the woods into poems, plays, and stories of all kinds. Despite the hundreds of women’s music clubs that existed across the nation, which offered the closest thing to a sustained musical community for women (and provided decades of performance venues for Amy Beach), they better served amateur performers and public-spirited music initiatives than their composer members’ specialized needs. The colony provided a meeting place for these composing women and many others. Supporting creative, accomplished women in a communal environment at a time when such environments were nearly nonexistent may be one of the MacDowell Colony’s greatest legacies for women in the arts in the United States. Beach met Bauer at the colony, and together they became founding members of the American Music Guild (1921) and the Society of American Women Composers (1925), an organization dedicated to nurturing and supporting women attempting to make their way in an overwhelmingly male profession.1 Amy Beach was elected the society’s first president in 1925. Bauer would also become a board member of the League of Composers, a society founded in 1923 that was dedicated to the encouragement of contemporary music. Bauer and Talma also shared the experience of having worked with Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979); the French pedagogue exerted enormous influence over many composers in the first half of the twentieth century, but especially these women, their work, and their lives. That Bauer and Talma pursued careers at major universities and secured teaching positions in New York City is likely the result of Boulanger’s modeling, mentorship, and influence. Bauer became the first woman music department faculty member at New York University, where she taught from 1926 to 1951, and added in 1940 an adjunct position at the Juilliard School, where she taught until 1955. Talma earned degrees at 27 Nature as a Summer Home NYU and Columbia, attended Juilliard, and taught at the Manhattan...