American Composer Mabel Wheeler Daniels
Wrote "An American Girl in Munich" About Her Studies
Oct 20, 2008
Mabel Wheeler Daniels was fortunate that she came from a prosperous family, her father being vice president of the Boston Board of Trade.
She was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, on November 27,1878, and was raised by her mother to appreciate the arts and to make the most of her talents in music. Both her grandfathers were church organists and many of her family sang in the Handel and Haydn Society, of which her father was president.
Radcliffe College: Early Education
Her early education was at the Girls' Latin School in Boston and she graduated from that institution in 1896. She then went to Radcliffe College where she became a member of the Glee Club and conducted on many occasions.
It was at Radcliffe that Mabel started to become serious about a professional career as a composer. She graduated magna cum laude in 1900, after which she went on to study composition at the New England Conservatory of Music with George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) a well-known composer based in Boston.
Ludwig Thuille in Munich
Mabel and her mother traveled to Munich in 1920, where the young composer was the first woman to be admitted to Tuille's score-reading class at the Royal Conservatory of Munich. After this time of study Mabel wrote "An American Girl In Munich" (Little, Brown and Co.,1912), which chronicled her time of study there and her deep appreciation of the onus put on the composer to be the master of his/her emotions, no matter how deeply those emotions might be felt.
Daniels stayed in Boston, having great appreciation for the musical life there, and directed the Radcliffe Glee Club as well as taking on the position of director of the music department at Simmons College from 1913 to 1918.Daniels was also a director of the Zumbler Symphonietta.
Compositions
Some of Daniels' works include two cantatas, "The Desolate City," and "Jael," and three compositions which were played at concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra...Exultate Deo,1929; Deep Forest, 1931 and A Psalm of Praise, 1954; a sonata for violin and piano, two operettas written for Radcliffe College,a choral cycle, "In Springtime,"Pirate's Island," for orchestra and many others.
Mabel Wheeler Daniels died in Cambridge, Massachusetts,at the age of ninety-three,on May 10,1971.
The American composer Randall Thompson pronounced Mabel Daniels to be "one of our finest composers." A welcome comment for a woman who had devoted her life to composition during the time of great prejudice because of her gender.
Source
Notable American Women The Modern Period Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980
Women of Notes:1,000 Women Composers Born Before 1900 Anya Laurence, Richards Rosen Press, NYC 1978
For further reading about female composers see Ruth Crawford Seeger
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