Mabel Daniels An American Composer In Transition

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.

Exploring a diverse, distinguished repertoire, and transcending the rhetoric of neglect, this book transforms understanding of women composers.

The first book in twenty-five years to survey the life and music of America's pioneering female composer of concert works.

An overview of women's work in classical and popular music since 1900 as performers, composers, educators and music technologists.

Daniels was a New England composer. She studied at the newly founded Radcliffe College at Harvard, and was later the first women in Ludwig Tuille's score-reading class at the Munich Conservatory. She was head of music at Simmons College, Boston, and a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony for 24 summers from 1914. She worked for women's suffrage and was endlessly generous to other musicians, giving anonymous composition prizes, and establishing a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music. She preferred writing for voices, and choral pieces are among her best known works. She also wrote stage, orchestral and instrumental music. Her musical language includes triadic harmony with occasional diatonic dissonance; the melodic lines are sometimes angular, due partly to modal shifts and unpredictable triads.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision. The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.