Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, eds. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xi, 357 pp. ISBN 0-520-083-954 (hardcover) Mona Mender. Extraordinary Women in Support of Music. Lanham, Md., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1997. x, 309 pp. ISBN 0-8108-3278-X (hardcover)

Abstract

Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, eds. Cultivating in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xi, 357 pp. ISBN 0-520-083-954 (hardcover). Mona Mender. Extraordinary Women in Support of Music. Lanham, Md., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1997. x, 309 pp. ISBN 0-8108-3278-X (hardcover). Cultivation. Allusions and associations for this word abound. To cultivate is to prepare for growth, to till, foster, further, refine, and encourage. Thus latent power lying dormant in image of a seed being planted, nurtured, and harvested, while not exclusively within domain of female, nevertheless invokes power and potential inherent in feminine. Cultivation's engagement with fertility, growth, and new life forms germinating kernel of essays contained in Cultivating in America and activities of enterprising women eloquently recorded therein. The joint editors, Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr, each of whom have contributed individual chapters to this volume, are to be congratulated for wonderful set of essays gathered here. Locke and Barr, who have each published articles on related subjects before (he in 19th-century and she in Journal of Musicology, both in 1993), now join together to create a truly powerful book. They also manage to bring coherence to a potentially disparate collection of essays by several different authors while permitting extended individual evaluations of four main subjects: Bostonian art collector Isabella Stewart Gardiner; Jeanette Thurber, who brought Antonfn Dvofak to New York as head of National Conservatory; pianist, composer, and patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge who commissioned works from several important composers including Bartok, Copland, and Stravinsky; and Sophie Drinker, whose Women and Music: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music, published in 1948, represents a musicological milestone. The work of these four enterprising women, presented roughly chronologically, are further elucidated through documentary vignettes (letters, diaries, newspaper reports, etc.) scattered throughout text which allow lost voices of relevant individuals to be heard, unmediated. Additional chapters discuss other musical activists of lesser renown, describe relevant trends - including institution of musical clubs and other kinds of organizations in various locales - and provide further contextual information, permitting a more complete survey of activities of women in musical America in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introductory chapter, Music Patronage as a 'Female-Centered Cultural Process,' embeds customary summary of forthcoming chapters within a lively and thought-provoking discussion of broader sociological issues and challenges to conventional musicology raised by topic of women and patronage. Because male composers and now canonic musical masterpieces they created have dominated traditional musicology, the different ways in which other members of social body - professional or amateur performer, patron, music educator, critic, audience member or compact disk purchaser - experience and influence music, is rarely considered. All these individuals play essential roles in musical life of a given place and time, enabling as they do creation - and continued meaningful existence, in performance and interpretation - of those great musical works that we are taught to admire and love (p. 3). Social feminism and political and ideological developments are inevitably at core of collection, although some authors seem more comfortable than others with large and looming questions these positions pose (more on this later). The role of selected women patrons and importance of unremunerated work and volunteer efforts in development of American musical culture forms core of individual essays. …