Conference Agenda

The General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ 1906 meeting, held in St. Paul, Minnesota’s three-thousand seat armory, included a lengthy concert of works by women composers, including Amy Beach and Harriet Ware. In the early twentieth century, American women’s clubs’ promotion of women composers’ music was part of their campaign to create a classical music culture on par with that of Europe. The General Federation, the National Federation of Music Clubs, and other groups advocated music by American composers, including women. Over nine hundred club events devoted to American women composers took place before 1950, with performances dominated by the song repertoire that Christopher Reynolds (2013) has documented. Drawing on the GFWC and NFMC archives and the contemporary press, this paper explores the means by which the nationalistic campaigns of American women’s organizations helped to make compositions by women a regular fixture at club meetings.

Federation leaders publicized women composers and supplied materials for clubs’ programming. The NFMC’s study chair, Linda Wardwell, compiled American Music: Autobiographical Sketches and Musical Programs (1920), which included biographies and works lists for 27 women composers. Under music head Anne Oberndorfer, the GFWC’s loan program circulated scores by thirty women to clubs. In the 1930s, Gena Branscombe helped produce the GFWC’s pamphlet, providing seven women composers programs and listing over 250 works; the pamphlet had to be reprinted due to high demand. The two Federations’ nationalistic rhetoric was echoed by the composers of the National League of American Pen Women, which hosted two concerts at the White House. In 1940, Janet Cutler Mead, the first head of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Advancement of American Music Committee, called for programs of women’s music. Some fifty chapters complied, relying on her programming suggestions in National Historical Magazine. Due to multiple organizations’ efforts, music by over seventy women was performed by clubs across the country; twenty composers had their pieces programmed for more than three decades. Although women composers were only one aspect of organizations’ larger political agenda for American music, their works came to hold a prominent position on club programs due to their American identity.

In 1925, Agnes Woodward’s Whistling as an Art appeared in print, published by Carl Fischer. The method book provided students direction in “the development of tone, technic [sic] and style,” a beginning repertory, and a list of additional pieces appropriate for whistling performance. This method represents Woodward’s commitment to propagating bird whistling, and to supporting the many students who had studied with her since 1909, when she founded the California School of Artistic Whistling in Los Angeles. As the unusual school developed, Woodward recognized the connections among teaching, developing a method, and supporting her students as potential professional musicians. Although not all of her students were girls and women, they formed the majority and needed a special kind of support. To this end Woodward held regular public recitals showcasing her students, which included performances by her whistling chorus. She also placed advertisements in publications like The Lyceum Magazine to advertise their availability as performers across the United States. In the earliest years of her school, Woodward’s bird whistlers were heard on Lyceum and Chautauqua stages. Later, they performed on radio, made sound recordings, provided sound effects in movies, and appeared on Broadway. And they taught Woodward’s method.

The appearance in print of Whistling as an Art allowed Woodward’s technique to move more easily beyond Los Angeles. An expanded edition of Whistling as an Art appeared in 1938, the year that Woodward died, interpolating some of her best students’ examples of bird songs, and representing a continuation of her vocation.

Woodward’s method made a women’s musical and professional network around whistling possible: it propagated connections among teachers and students, performers and listeners. This acknowledgement of Woodward’s work builds on Sondra Wieland Howe’s scholarship, which makes visible how women’s work in music education connected them to the publishing industry. Drawing on letters, advertisements, and reviews of the method in the press, this paper shows how Woodward’s musical innovation and mentorship provided these women entrance into the music business as entrepreneurial participants.

In a 1934 article, “Kept Music,” the composer Henry Cowell satirized society women who obliged composers to provide “socially acceptable” music, thereby exercising “authority over the composer.” At that time Cowell was working with women leaders of the National Federation of Music Clubs on a joint venture of “International Exchange Concerts.” Their common purpose was to build a market for contemporary US concert music and increase its worldwide stature by arranging performances abroad. Relying on Cowell’s correspondence, the Federation’s archives, and clubs’ records, this presentation outlines cooperation and conflicts between Cowell and the Federation and describes their growing commitment to international engagement.

Cowell partnered with Helen Harrison Mills, the Federation’s Chairman of International Music Relations, to arrange one-to-one trades: a concert of American music played abroad in exchange for a concert of that country’s music in the USA. The biggest challenge was locating volunteers willing to learn and play contemporary music. Federation members became a primary labor force for the US concerts. While Cowell corresponded with composers abroad to gather, select, and transmit music, Mills asked clubs to perform the music and helped Cowell distribute repertoire. But Federation members wanted to send abroad music in a broader range of styles, including compositions by women, and clubs wanted a say in what they would perform. Mills told Cowell: if he wanted the most prestigious clubs to participate, “we better let them do this their way.” My account of these frictions complements prior research on Cowell’s relations with women patrons (Oja 1997, 2012) and his Pan-American projects (Root 1972, Stallings 2009, Sachs 2012).

The project had significant outcomes. In 1934 the Federation claimed exchange participation in 31 US states. Some clubs gave as many as four international concerts. Mills reported that the project grew beyond its “concert for concert” origins into a “movement”: “We give as many programs of as many nations’ music as we can here; we ask the same of other nations.” For Cowell and the Federation alike, the International Exchange Concerts sparked further international activities, formal and informal, that would shape their work in the decades that followed.