"Excellence in Execution" and "Fitness for Teaching": Assessments of Women at the Conservatoire Américain

In 1921 german-born american conduc-tor Walter Damrosch and French conductor and composer Francis Casadesus opened a new school for American musicians in the Palais de Fontainebleau, just outside of Paris. This school, which became known as the Conservatoire Américain, was created to offer American musicians advanced training in performance, composition, and teaching. Over time, the Conservatoire produced numbers of successful composers, performers, scholars, and instructors such as Bathia Churgin, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Dorothy de Val, Herbert Elwell, Pamela Frank, Helen Hosmer, Charles Rosen, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Andre-Michel Schub, Louise Talma, Augusta Read Thomas, and Charles Wuorinen.

Prior to the First World War American musicians frequently traveled to Germany and Austria for such education, which was not readily available in the United States' fledgling conservatories and schools of music. Female instrumentalists were especially drawn to study in Germany and Austria, where, following the model of Clara Schumann and other professional women, female concert artists were both comfortably situated as normal members of society and positively received in the concert hall as serious artists. The students who made this trek and enrolled in the Hochschule in those countries were serious practitioners, having exhausted their domestic resources for coaching and pedagogy, and they were, without exception, less interested in pursuing the more traditional path of becoming educators than in attaining careers as soloists. Pianist Julie Rive-King, violinists Camille Urso and Maud Powell, and cellist Elsa Reugger all left the United States to pursue further training in Germany and Austria, having found that the societal limitations placed on women in the United States hampered their abilities to reach their full potential. With the advent of the war, however, travel to Germany was neither practical nor politically advisable. Seeing this as an opportunity to both help repay the assistance of their allies in the war and promote French culture above German culture in America, the French government assisted Casadesus and Damrosch in their venture. Because the Paris Conservatoire placed strict restrictions on its applicants in terms of age and nationality, Casadesus and Damrosch decided to hire members of its faculty during the summer to staff a summertime conservatory. Thus, the Conservatoire Américain opened its doors to some ninety American music students in June 1921, offering them three months of rigorous study.

In establishing the Conservatoire, Casadesus and Damrosch had three primary goals: that students of the highest level would be trained at the school by the best French musicians; that Franco-American exchange and goodwill would be cultivated on an advanced cultural and artistic level; and, most remarkably for its time, that men and women would be trained for professional careers on an equal basis.¹ In this article I examine this last tenet of the founders through the lens of the assessment of female students at the Conservatoire Américain.

Admissions assessments, internal examinations, and the granting of diplomas were three ways in which women were evaluated and taught at the Conservatoire. Drawing on the school's archival documents and the testimony of students, I show that despite both deliberate and unintended stereotyping and discrimination among some school policies and instructors, women at the Conservatoire did in fact receive educations equal to their male counterparts, in some cases surpassing them in overall achievement. The evidence presented here also establishes that the exit assessments—diplomas and prizes—made by the Conservatoire had an impact on the acceptance of its alumnae as professionally qualified musicians. Although a full examination of their posttraining careers is outside the scope of this article, it is important to note that many women who graduated from the Conservatoire Américain went on to hold positions in American musical life as soloists, orchestra concertmasters and principals, chamber musicians, conductors, composers, instructors, and music school deans and heads. Women who attended the Conservatoire before the Second World War were often pioneering in their accomplishments and were among the very first American women to gain permanent orchestral positions, have professional chamber music ensembles, and hold positions of power within the musical education establishment. Women also...