Women Patrons and Activists For Modernist Music: New York in the 1920s

Historians of American music have vigorously acclaimed the rising young composers of the 1920s. As the legend goes, that decade saw something special happen, and New York City was the central place where it occurred. Challenging a conservative and inhospitable music establishment, figures such as Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, and Edgard Varèse struck out on their own to form performance societies and publishing enterprises that would promote the newest compositions. In a few short years New York was transformed from a remote outpost of modernism, a city whose concert life had been suffocated by “the grey musty presence” of the traditional European repertory (as the critic Paul Rosenfeld rued in 1920), into “the capital of the musical world,” as contemporary commentators repeatedly boasted. ¹ The composers at the center of these changes deliberately cultivated an image of autonomy and iconoclasm. While such a stance was basic to modernists throughout the Western world, it assumed particular contours in the United States, where the battle for recognition and respect was especially intense. Leaders among America’s young composers, perhaps by necessity, became deft spin artists who shaped gritty images of self-sufficiency, often tapping into cherished American myths of the pioneer and the inventor. Henry Cowell, for example, described his colleagues from this period as “experimental,” “uninhibited,” and “untamed,” characterizations that have been repeated over the years by subsequent historians. The British critic Wilfrid Mellers, in a survey of American music history, titles his chapter on composers since World War I, “The Pioneer and the Wilderness.” ²

While notions of iconclasm and aesthetic autonomy can account for some features of the modern-music movement in New York during the 1920s, they obscure the complexity of the community that brought it into being. Composers certainly dominated the foreground, but they did not attain success alone. Theirs was a collective effort rather than one of isolated trailblazers, and it succeeded because of an intricate network of publishers, promoters, performers, editors, and patrons. At its core were women. They often worked behind the scenes, devising strategies to give the new music viability on the American cultural scene. As Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Society, wrote in 1923, “I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America.” ³ Damrosch was not just reflecting on the recent past, when women had worked to establish prominent musical institutions such as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, but also revealing much about the scene in which the avant-garde was taking hold.

Simultaneously, however, Damrosch’s comment also pinpointed the limitations of women’s involvement in modern music: they “fostered” its growth. Among American modernist composers, few were female—only Marion Bauer, whose work as composer, critic, and teacher remains insufficiently appreciated, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, a much more widely acclaimed figure, especially for her innovative String Quartet 1931. Some women specialized in performing new repertory, most notably the singers Eva Gauthier, Greta Torpadie, and Radiana Pazmor. Others edited New York’s composer magazines. Minna Lederman was the best known among them for her work at the helm of Modern Music, a “little magazine” published in New York from 1924 to 1946; Louise Varèse, wife of the composer and noted translator in her own right, worked with Carlos Salzedo to edit Eolian Review, a harp journal that became a forum for Edgard Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild; and Ely Jade, a pseudonym for Germaine Schmitz, edited Pro Musica Quarterly, the publication of yet another modern-music organization, Pro Musica, that was directed by her husband E. Robert Schmitz. ⁴ While a complete account of the impact of women on New York’s new-music movement would treat all these figures, the focus here will be on a sector of female activity that was crucial to shaping the institutional network in which modernist composers emerged—the patronage of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Alma Morgenthau Wertheim, and Blanche Walton, and the patronage and organizational skill of Claire Reis. These women have...