Jeannette Meyers Thurber and the National Conservatory of Music

Abstract

The National Conservatory of Music of America was the outstanding institution for professional musical preparation in the United States for some twenty-five years or more after its opening in 1885. At its height in the 1890s it boasted a faculty of international renown, attracted Antonin DvoiAk to New York, and initiated a course of study whose features became a basis for the curriculum now taken for granted in the colleges and conservatories of this country. Its achievements resulted from the endeavors of a single visionary: Jeannette M. Thurber, a wealthy, idealistic New Yorker who devoted most of her life to the school. In recognition of those artistic and educational attainments the National Conservatory won a congressional charter in 1891, the only such acknowledgment ever conferred on a school of the arts in the United States. Although her innovative design for the conservatory was influential in shaping the course of American music for the twentieth century, Mrs. Thurber and her school have slipped into undeserved obscurity, overshadowed by the surge in postsecondary music education that followed the First World War. This article outlines the history of that school and Mrs. Thurber's contributions to it.