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The music of Mary
Howe first became known to me in 1984 when I was
searching for a short cello piece to be included in a
concert program by the Aviva Players, a chamber music
group that features the works of women composers. My
search at the American Music Collection at the New York
Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center
was rewarded when I found Ballade Fantasque
by Mary Howe. It was listed in the bibliography Women in
American Music, a seminal work by Block and Neuls Bates
on the role of women in American life from colonial times
to the present. The Ballade proved to be highly original
in its melodic lyricism, jazzy rhythms and the virtuosity
of the writing. Frequently performed, it has always been
well received.
Some time later I attended a lecture by the prominent
musicologist, Nancy Reich who had just published a book
on Clara Schumann (1819–1896), the celebrated
pianist and wife of Robert Schumann. Reich illuminated
the life of Clara Schumann, the composer - a tale of an
extraordinarily gifted woman who began composing at the
age of ten, but whose confidence dwindled after she
assumed the responsibilities of wife, mother, concert
pianist and promoter of the works of her husband, the
composer Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann wrote. "I
once believed that I had creative talent, but I have
given up this idea: a woman must not wish to compose -
there never was one able to do it." (How sadly
misinformed she was!)
With her biography of Clara Schumann, Reich made me aware
of the gaps in music history, particularly in the area of
woman composers, I devoted the next several years to
examing the life and works of Mary Howe (1882–1964),
a composer who faced many of the same hurdles that Clara
Schumann had faced almost one hundred years earlier.
Mother, wife, concert pianist, Mary Howe was more
fortunate than Clara Schumann because many women had in
the interim emerged as serious composers and Howe's
musical world included some of them. The most prominent
American woman composer to date was Amy (Mrs. H. H. A.)
Beach, who in association with Howe and a group of other
women composers, organized The Society of American Women
Composers in 1925. However, it was not until she was
forty years of age that Howe determined to make
composition a major element in her professional life.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1882, Mary Howe's
passion for music grew more powerful as she matured. Her
early musical and piano training was under the private
tutelage of Herminie Seron. In 1904 she studied piano for
a short intensive period in Dresden, Germany with Richard
Burmeister, a former pupil of Liszt. She returned to the
U. S. to give recitals in and around Washington, D.C.
which had become her home. In 1912 she married Walter
Bruce Howe and they begun to raise a family of three
children. During this period she entered the Peabody
Conservatory of Music to study piano with Ernest
Hutcheson and Harold Randolph. There she met Anne Hull,
an accomplished colleague and together they formed a
duo-pianist team that toured in recital from
1920–1935.
At Peabody, Howe studied composition with Gustave Strube,
a former violinist with the Gewandhaus and Boston
Symphony Orchestras, and who in 1916 became the first
conductor of the Baltimore Symphony. Howe earned her
diploma in composition in 1922. Although she had already
composed a number of mature works, she wrote "...it
was not until 1924 that I really started composing. I can
only say it was because gates had been opened and I
wanted to go into those fields and pastures...that had
always seemed the property of other people...I used to
love piano playing, and wrestling with the difficulties,
and the great effort to interpret. But when I began to
compose I felt I had the right to be there doing it
because what I worked on was myself." A short period
of coaching with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1933 marked
the end of Howe's formal training in composition.
Howe set down strong roots in the Washington, D.C.
community and was actively involved in its musical
affairs. Her foremost interest was the National Symphony
Orchestra of which she founded in collaboration with her
husband, Walter Bruce Howe, and a group of like-minded
civic leaders. From its first season in 1931 through
1948, she served on the board of directors of the
National Symphony Orchestra Association and organized the
Women's Committee of the Association serving as its
chairman for many years. The list of her associations
with other civic enterprises includes the Friends of
Music in the Library of Congress (initially called the
Chamber Music Society of Washington), the Society of
American Women Composers as already noted, the National
Federation of Music Clubs, the Friday Morning Music Club,
as well as the MacDowell Colony, and Bennington College.
From 1924 up until the years before her death in 1964,
Howe amassed a diverse catalogue which was formally
complied in 1994 by her son Calderon Howe and which forms
the basis of these notes. It consists of more than two
hundred works comprising pieces for orchestra, various
smaller instrumental ensembles, choral works, works for
one and two pianos and many art songs for solo voice.
Howe described her style of composition as "spanning
and bridging" - reaching from the past through the
contemporary to develop her own language, essentially
tonal but frequently dissonant when needed, inventive,
lyric and rich in texture. She always wrote with
conviction, imagination and variety of expression and
produced works that ranged dynamically from quiet
simplicity to the most complex.
The present CD features a generous sampling of Howe's
orchestral and chamber music writing. The most important
recordings are of the orchestral works because they are
also historical documents of Howe's long association with
the American conductor William Strickland.
(1914–1991). Howe's collaborative relationship with
Strickland developed when he came to Washington, D.C. in
1942 to be stationed at the Army Music School at Fort
Meyer where he organized and directed the Army Music
School Choir. During this period, Strickland commissioned
a piece from Howe, Prophecy (1792)
(1943), a setting for chorus and orchestra of excerpts
from William Blake's "A Song of Liberty."
At the conclusion of World War II, Strickland left
Washington for Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the
Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 1946 and was its
conductor until 1951. He returned to the northeast to
assume direction of the Oratorio Society of New York and
to engage in musical activities in Washington. He
reported that "Mary was very interested in me and
what I was doing, and helped me a great deal. She was
keen, perspicacious and sharp sighted." In
1951–1953, Strickland was awarded a Fulbright
scholarship, and in 1955 a Ditson Fellowship of Columbia
University. Under the aegis of the State Department, he
went abroad to promote American music. He conducted a
number of major orchestras in Europe and the Far East,
including the Tokyo and Manila Philharmonic Orchestras as
well as orchestras in Poland and Iceland. In 1955, he
performed her Stars, Sand
and Castellana with the Vienna
Philharmonc. During this period, Strickland also made a
number of recordings of American orchestral repertoire
for CRI. Stars was composed in 1927 for
orchestra and has been widely performed and recorded. It
has been played by the National Symphony Orchestra under
Hans Kindler, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold
Stokowski and by Quinto Maganini's Little Symphony and
more recently by the San Francisco Symphony in 1995.
Howe describes Stars as "...a
miniature tone-poem inspired by the gradually
overwhelming effect of the dome of a starry night - its
peace, beauty and space. The sonorous ensemble of the
strings opens the work with the suggestion of the
spreading immensity of the starry vault. As the music
progresses, one’s imagination is carried into the
contemplation of the awesome depths of space and the
sense of mystery which man compares his insignificance
with infinity."
Sand, composed in 1928, has been equally
widely performed often as a companion piece to Stars.
Howe describes Sand as an
"imaginative piece on the substance itself - its
consistency, grains, bulk, grittiness and its potential
scattering quality; more or less what it appears to be
when sifting through your fingers on the shore."
Leopold Stokowski wrote to Howe, "I enjoyed so much
conducting your short but masterful work. I have had much
pleasure in rehearsing it and has developed in me a new
conception of staccato, which perhaps you will notice
when you hear it. But of course this is only one of the
many interesting elements in the work."
It was Strickland who asked Howe to compose another piece
that along with Stars and Sand
would make a more substantial group. The result was Rock
composed in 1954 for large orchestra that portrayed the
substance, rock, in her words as "impregnable,
amenable, usable, sentinel, lonely, steadfast,
withstanding, magnificent and undeniable." The three
pieces together examine the meaning, the aura and the
imaginative exploration of these substances.
Castellana: Romanesca on Spanish Themes
for two pianos was composed in 1930 and was premiered the
same year at the Friday Morning Music Club in Washington
by Howe and her collaborator, Anne Hull. In 1934, Howe
reworked the piece for two pianos and orchestra and this
version was first performed in 1935 by Ethel Barlett and
Rae Robertson with the National Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Hans Kindler. A brilliant performance in
1955 by Celius Doigherty and Vincenz Ruzicka,
duo-pianists with the Vienna Orchestra under William
Strickland, was received with great enthusiasm by
Viennese critics and audiences, and was the occasion for
the first recording of the piece by CRI.
In an article by Kindler in the Washington Post, 1939,
Mary Howe is quoted describing Castellana
as a piece:
"built on four authentic Spanish folk tunes which I
have never seen in any collection but which I heard sung
by some delightful Spanish cousins of my father. The
piece begins with some free material of my own as an
introduction, leading into the first folk tune, the words
of a verse which will indicate its gay village quality:
'From the market place to the green cross she goes - and
doesn't care at all.' The chorus 'Come and see me, early
rose; come and see me tomorrow, etc.' This and its
development make my first section after the introduction,
and lead into the romantic love song which is the slow
movement of the piece and has as honest poem on
sentiment: 'Love grows as shadow - distance only makes it
greater. Today a hope is born, tomorrow dies and so one
goes, forgetting what one cares for. But I tell you, one
who has loved cannot forget.'
"There follows a section built on my recollection of
two bars of Spanish accompaniment leading with some force
and brilliance into the two-piano cadenza of free
question and answer, which brings us into the scherzo of
the piece, the song of the guava vendor with a lively and
persistent rhythm and rapidly enunciated line. Here the
words outstripped me as they were always sung fast and
with precise accent, winding up with 'please inform me if
you like them! See, here comes the guayabera.'
"So, without delay, into the final fourth section, a
catchy, not usual type of tune capable of amusing
manipulations, and which the words were naughty enough to
be kept from me, although my father sang them with glee.
There follows a coda which combines bits of all four
tunes and winds up with and uncomplicated cluster of
skyrockets to finish."
In 1928, Howe composed a Suite for String Quartet
and Piano which is in three parts, Romanza;
Scherzo, and Finale. It was the beginning of a fecund
period for Howe in when she wrote many art songs, chamber
music works and orchestral pieces of distinction. The
Suite is a richly melodic piece with original themes that
are freely developed. The three movements, each having
their individual color and spirit and contrasting vividly
with each other, are woven together with genuine
craftsmanship into a unified whole, in which the various
instruments are balanced with great dexterity.
Interlude Between Two Pieces was written
in 1942 for Howe's son, Calderon. Originally intended for
alto recorder and harpsichord, the piece is in three
sections, Traits, Interlude, and Tactics. It was first
performed on December 31 1942 at one of the Howe family's
traditional New Year's Eve musicales by Calderon Howe,
alto recorder, and Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichordist. In
the composer's words, "Traits has two themes, one
almost like a blues melody played over a filigree
accompaniment, the other a spiritual over the same
support. Interlude is a simple interlude which leaves you
up in the air just the way an interlude ought to. Tactics
is a forthright piece with two themes sparring for
position which come out quite well adjusted to each
other." Performances of this work has since been
given by Wallace Mann, flute and Emerson Meyers, piano,
and most recently by Melanie Bradford and Mara Waldman,
on the same instrumental combination.
Three Pieces After Emily Dickinson for
string quartet was composed in 1941 and comprises three
separate movements, each coupled with the last line from
one of Emily Dickinson poems: Andante con moto ("The
summers of Hesperides"), Tranquillo ("Birds, by
the snow") and Allegretto ("God for a
frontier"). The individual movements are not
settings of the poems, as Howe explained: "For some
reason unknown to me, the last line in each poem called
upon in my mind not a musical theme but the sort of music
I wanted to write." The work is richly imaginative
and modern in feeling with the use of dissonance.
Spring Pastoral is a setting of a
published poem by Elinor Wylie. This piece was originally
composed in 1936 as a chorus for three part women's
voices with piano accompaniment and was published in 1938
by G. Schirmer. It has been variously described as
"a wistful tone poem, adroitly scored with a keen
sense of instrumental color which embodies the
timelessness and the bittersweet poignancy of a drowsy
reverie over a memory of long ago;" "...a
delicate and sensitive, yet intensely felt composition
full of the mood its title invokes;" "...a
soaring ecstatic melody, the 'ur' stamp of the authentic
composer." This short piece arranged for strings,
flutes, oboes, bassoons and horns sings with Howe's lyric
power contained in a gossamer veil of sound.
- Dorothy Indenbaum
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