Faculty-Student Collaborative: Selma Riemenschneider and the Baldwin Wallace Bach Heritage Danielle M. Kuntz (bio) Introduction The Baldwin Wallace (BW) Bach Festival, established in 1933 and now the oldest collegiate Bach Festival in the United States, rose to national prominence under the artistic guidance of Albert Riemenschneider, festival director until his death in 1950. What little scholarship exists on the BW Bach Festival is, expectedly, a male-focused narrative of BW’s Bach heritage—the study and performance of J. S. Bach’s music under the leadership of a series of male artistic directors, from the establishment of the festival under Albert in the early twentieth century to the present day.1 As steward to the BW Bach heritage in my position as Riemenschneider Bach Institute (RBI) scholar-in-residence, I have worked closely with the historical documents related to the BW Bach Festival.2 [End Page 96] I have discovered that one of the most compelling aspects of these documents is the unequivocal influence of women—most notably Albert’s wife, Selma Riemenschneider—at all levels of its establishment, development, and success. In spite of recent work on questions of gender in Bach scholarship, the lack of attention to women’s roles is in line with the male-dominated themes of much Bach research of the past, including studies of Bach culture in America.3 Over the past few decades, however, feminist musicological and archival scholars have advocated a shift away from focus on the “male-controlled cultural product” in favor of the “female-centered cultural process” in music.4 [End Page 97] Moreover, many writers have argued decisively for the meaningful role of women and women’s organizations in shaping American musical culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 While working closely with the materials of the Bach Festival, I began to ask: in what (multiple, overlapping) ways have women participated in and shaped Bach Festival culture at BW? To what extent can the establishment, development, and success of the BW Bach Festival be characterized as a female-centered cultural process? In the academic year 2020–2021, I had the opportunity to pursue these questions with four brilliant undergraduate students— Anna-Sophia Burr, Olivia Helman, Madeline Mascia, and Ben Webster. Together, these students and I undertook a comprehensive archival exploration of women’s engagement in the BW Bach Festival through the support of a BW Faculty-Student Collaborative Course. We examined a vast repository of the RBI’s festival-related documents—correspondence, receipts, programs, rehearsal schedules, and many other types of materials to be discussed in the subsequent student reports. In each box and folder, women’s voices constantly rose to the surface, from well-known Cleveland area patrons like Sophia Schlather, who donated important sums of money to the festival, to the many now forgotten Berea-area women who made the Bach Festival a community endeavor by volunteering their time and energy to its success. Women also figured prominently in the performances of the Bach Festival, which amplified the careers of local performers like Mary Marting Pendell, niece of Albert and Selma. [End Page 98] What we discovered across all of these documents was a central core of women for whom the BW Bach Festival held personal and sometimes spiritual significance. These women worked in many ways to link the fledgling Bach experiment in Berea to a vast network of women-led organizations that were invested in increasing high-quality arts access to women and their families across Northeast Ohio. Of all the women who helped steer the BW Bach Festival, none was more influential than Selma Riemenschneider. A graduate of the piano, vocal, and classical studies programs of BW, Selma followed the path of many middle- and upper-class women of her time in pursuing high-level musical training without specific professional aspirations to a career in music.6 Upon her graduation in 1904, she married Albert, who was by then the director of a newly founded Conservatory of Music. She continued to study, perform, and teach music until her focus shifted largely to the domestic sphere with the birth of her children from 1908. From this point, Selma employed her strong musical background in...