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celebrating three hundred years of music by women |
Mabel Wheeler Daniels (1879-1971)
Daniels was a New England composer, conductor and teacher. She studied at the newly founded Radcliffe College at Harvard, and then was taught by George Chadwick. Later, she was the first women in Ludwig
Tuille's score-reading class at the Munich Conservatory. There, Daniels boldly insisted on auditioning for Bernhard Stavenhagen’s score-reading class. Up until that point no woman had successfully gained admittance to the class. Daniels recalled her experience auditioning for this position in front of a class of 30 males: "You could have heard a pin drop, the place was so still. . . . Just as I took my seat before the keyboard, I heard one of the men smother a laugh. That settled it! I was bound to do or die, and with a calmness quite unnatural I played the bars set before me without a mistake. Nobody laughed when I had finished."An early choral work for baritone and orchestra was Daniels’ The Desolate City; Marion MacDowell was so struck by it that she asked her to direct a performance at the Colony's Festival. She became Head of Music at Simmons College, Boston, and a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony from 1913 and for 24 summers; there her cantata The Desolate City gained considerable praise in 1913. She worked for women's suffrage and was endlessly generous to other musicians, giving composition prizes, and establishing a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music; in 1960 she endowed Tufts with The Mabel Daniels Prize in Music and Literature. She preferred writing for voices, and choral pieces are among her best known works. Exultate Deo, Op 33, (1929) became one of her most popular works. She also wrote stage, orchestral and instrumental music. She was awarded honorary degrees in 1933 and 1939 from Tufts University and Boston University respectively. Her musical language includes triadic harmony with occasional diatonic dissonance; the melodic lines are sometimes angular, due partly to modal shifts and unpredictable triads. Her main publisher was Arthur P. Schmidt. Deep Forest, Op 34 No 1. 1931 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, she spent several summers at the MacDowell Colony and was inspired by the New Hampshire woods. She wrote of this work, 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. The Ambache Chamber Orchestra gave its modern European première in London in May 2004. The DC Concert Society played it in March 2024. Published by Carl Fischer.com Mabel Daniels, an American Composer in Transition, Maryann McCabe, Routledge , 2018. An American Girl in Munich, Impressions of a music student, Little Brown, Boston , 1905. Recording Love, the Fair Day Albany. New World Records Deep Forest, Imperial Philharmonic of Tokyo. Published works Piper Play On! Through the Dark the Dreamers Came, Op 32; Salve, Festa Dies; E C S Publishing . Duma Dianae vitrea Treble Clef Press. Carol of a Rose Wise Classical/G Schirmer . Vocal works on E C Schirmer. Her Papers are held at Radcliffe Institute, Schlesinger Library, Harvard. There is quite a large collection of her music in the Library of Congress.
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