Women in Music Blog

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1934, Deon Nielsen was living at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone around 1946, when her father was stationed there. She was already a pianist and, at age 12, had her first paying job as a ballet school accompanist. She and her family regularly attended concerts at the National Theater. At one, she heard pianist Arthur Rubinstein , and at another, pianist Gyorgy Sandor . "I even slipped backstage during intermission for their autographs," she remembers. Those great pianists inspired her to become a concert pianist herself. Nearly 60 years later, in June 2005 , Deon returned to Panama with her son, Dr. Berkeley Price, a clarinetist--this time to give a concert. "Returning to the site of my early ambition now completes a circle," she told the audience. Ironically, Gyorgy Sandor died later that year. Deon attended high school in San Francisco, and took lessons from C.W. Reid at the San Francisco Academy of Music. She accompa...

She was born Marian Griswold Nevins on November 22, 1857, the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music.   Music was her gift.   Like many young women of her time and station, she traveled abroad to study piano.   In Frankfurt, Germany, she met a brilliant young American three years her junior, Edward MacDowell.   She became his student.   Love and marriage followed.   And Marian gave up any hope of a career in music to support her husband in his fledgling career as a composer.   In all likelihood, Marian MacDowell would have remained in the shadow of her celebrated husband.   But in 1905, Edward MacDowell fell ill, stricken with a debilitating nervous disease.   For some time the couple had considered how they could help the cause of young artists in America.   They had talked of turning their farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, into a working retreat, a woodland sanctuary that offered inspiration and the p...

I am writing a biography about composer, pianist, and pedagogue Louise Talma. The working title of this biography is “I am NOT a Woman Composer!” The Life and Music of Louise Talma (1906-1996) . I have an advance contract with the University of Illinois Press. Three more chapters, three more years (yes, my 12-month, full-time job takes lots of time). But now that I am about halfway through the book, the momentum is helping. Right now, I am writing Chapter IV which is built around the correspondence between Talma and Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder. Together they wrote a three-act grand opera, The Alcestiad . It was premiered in Germany in 1962 to twenty minutes of audience cheers, but has never been performed since or in the original language. Talma declared it "too expensive." I am writing this book because when I ask people how many twentieth century female composers they can name, I hear crickets. Talma is part of the fabric of twentieth century art musi...

In 1903, Dr. Winthrop Sterling, Dean of the Metropolitan College of Music, Elocution and Dramatic Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, had a dream that women music students should have an organization that would bring them together, providing a sense of well-being and guidance. He enlisted the help of his 19-year-old assistant and fellow faculty member, Elizabeth Mathias (later Elizabeth Mathias Fuqua) to establish such an organization. Image courtesy of the Mu Phi Epsilon 1904 Year-Book   Mu Phi Epsilon was to be chartered as a National Music Sorority, the first of its kind in the United States, working for a stronger foothold in the musical world where there could be equal opportunities for both sexes. Thus, the Mu Phi Epsilon Alpha Chapter held its first meeting with thirteen young women on that fateful November 13, 1903 (yes, it was a Friday!). The establishment of the Beta Chapter at the New England Conservatory in Boston soon followed, November 30, 1903.   ...