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Celebrating two hundred and fifty years of music by women |
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.Click on this work for more details below:
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Deep Forest, Op 34 No 1. 1931
A... fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, timp, strgs, 10 mins
This has the subtitle Prelude for Little Symphony. It was originally written for chamber orchestra in 1931, and revised for full orchestra in 1934. Like many of her New England colleagues, Daniels spent several summers at the MacDowell Colony and was inspired by the New Hampshire woods. She wrote of this, and the companion piece 'Pirate's island': "I had no program in mind for these pieces. The idea came to me when looking out from the windows of an old tower on a cliff by the ocean during a summer's day stroll. Through the window towards the land I saw in my imagination 'Deep Forest'. It is impossible not to be inspired by the magnificent surroundings at the Colony. I so constantly heard a flute against a background of muted strings, whenever I walked, that I finally had to put it on paper." It was frequently performed in her lifetime; the important conductors who took it up included Serge Koussevitsky and John Barbirolli. We, The Ambache, gave its European premiere in London in May 2004.
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