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Organizations of Women ComposersMusical Organizations Founded by Female Classical ComposersA brief look at several women composers of the past who were instrumental in being first in founding musical organizations and societies.
Several female musicians and composers founded organizations, institutions, clubs and societies which flourished and helped to bring classical music to the forefront. In doing so, these accomplished women became guiding lights behind several fine societies and schools of music. AmericaConstance Runcie organized the first women's club in America, the Minerva Club, in New Harmony, Indiana. She also founded the Bronte Club in Madison, Indiana, and the Runcie Club in St. Joseph. Missouri, in 1866. Angela Diller and Elizabeth Quaile founded the Diller-Quaile School of Music in New York City, and Diller also co-founded with Margarethe Dessoff the Dessoff Choirs of New York. Florence Sutro founded the National Music Clubs and Societies in Illinois in 1898. Schools of MusicPianist and composer Isabella Beaton founded the Beaton School of Music in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1910 and Ida Elkin, a New Yorker, founded the Ida Elkin School of Music in Manhattan. Eleanor Freer, a singer-composer from Philadelphia was a founder of the American Opera Society in Chicago, Illinois. Arriving in the United States from her native Austria, pianist Marie von Unschuld began the von Unschuld University of Music in Washington, D.C., and pianist Inga Hoegsbro started the Northern Conservatory of Music inNew York City in 1911. Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, a contralto, founded a music school in London, England in 1872, and Lina Ramann, biographer of :Liszt, directed a training school for music teachers in Gluckstadt, Holstein, from 1858 to 1864. Maria Theresa von Paradis, a blind pianist-composer who was a friend of Mozart, had her own music school for girls in Vienna. FestivalsDr. Annie Patterson, the first woman to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Music from the Royal University of Ireland, founded the National Festival at Feis Ceoil in 1887. In 1885 composer Augusta Wakefield established the Westmorland Festival at Sedgwick, England., and Louise Reichardt organized a Handel Festival in Berlin, Germany. OrchestrasMarie Wurm, a pianist who had studied with Clara Schumann, founded a women's orchestra in Berlin, Germany, and the noted composer Rebecca Clarke was the guiding light behind the English Ensemble, founded in 1928. Ethel Leginska, who was born in England, went to Boston and established the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and later the Women's Symphony of Boston, while even earlier composer Marion Osgood had started the first professional women's orchestra in America. In 1908, Dutch violinist Elizabeth Kuyper, who had been a student of composition with Max Bruch, founded the Berlin Tonkunsiterren Orchestra. And the Venezuelan pianist and singer Teresa Carreno established her own National Opera Company in 1885. It is said that she also conducted on one tour when the regular conductor became too frightened to go on stage during an uprising! We owe a debt of gratitude to these courageous women who did so much to further the cause of classical music in their lifetime. To read more about women in classical music see: Dramatic Soprano Gerda Nielsen American Composer Eugenie Rocherolle Source:Women of Notes: 1,000 Women Composers Born Before 1900, Richards Rosen Press Inc., New York City, 1978.
The copyright of the article Organizations of Women Composers in Classical Composers is owned by Anya Laurence. Permission to republish Organizations of Women Composers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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