Marion
Scott
and
the
Society
of Women Musicians
Writing in 1909, Marion
Scott issued a blunt warning to girls
and young women dreaming of careers
in classical music.
‘Professional life
is a really hard struggle...with orchestral
work it must be remembered that all
the best engagements are filled by men,
with the exception of harpists in some
of the orchestras,’ she wrote in the
Daily Express.(1) In her front
page article entitled ‘Music as a Profession’,
Marion observed that women organists
could also expect to find the doors
to churches closed to them because ‘all
the important posts are held by men.’(2)
In her opinion singers
stood the best chance for professional
success in opera - where women were
always needed - on the concert stage,
in musical comedy and as teachers. Pianists
might fare well as accompanists and
teachers while other instrumentalists
might teach privately or in schools
where they were expected to teach several
instruments in addition to their own.
Solo careers for women
instrumentalists were rare. A few managed
to enjoy success and serve as role models
for younger women: violinists Lady Hallé,
Marie Hall and May Harrison; cellists
Beatrice Harrison and May Mukle, and
pianist Fanny Davies among them.(3)
No one had ever heard of a woman music
critic or a woman musicologist.
With a few exceptions,
most notably Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)
and Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884), women
composers could expect to find their
work consigned to a silent destiny.(4)
If a woman wanted to conduct an orchestra,
she had to form her own. Less talented
women managed only to apply their musical
skills as either ‘lady-helps’ or governesses
while some gave up entirely and retreated
into the seemingly safer and more secure
world of marriage.(5)
Marion Scott had written
from her own experiences and from those
of her gifted women friends and associates.
Like many women of her generation, she
had dreamed of a career in music but
found the path toward her dream strewn
with obstacles. Marion was a gifted
violinist who began performing as a
soloist when she was 15 years old. She
held the distinction of being one of
Charles Villiers Stanford’s first female
pupils at the Royal College of Music
and one of the most promising, earning
from him a grade four in composition,
the second highest mark.(6) Her songs,
arrangements and chamber music were
performed in public and won critical
acclaim but none of her music was published.
Although she worked
occasionally in orchestras under men
like Stanford, Walter Parratt, Gustav
Holst and Samuel Coleridge Taylor, sometimes
serving as leader, she was not able
to secure a serious paying position
in any professional orchestra. Marion
did not have the physical stamina for
a full-time solo career, due in part
to the lingering effects of injuries
suffered in an accident when she was
young. Instead she formed her own string
quartet with the goal of championing
contemporary British music by both men
and women.
From childhood, Marion
was a self-assured, assertive risk-taker,
someone who always dared to cross boundaries,
to challenge convention and, in the
process, work to bring about change,
create opportunity, and improve life
for herself and for others. As she contemplated
the future of women in music, she began
to formulate a strategy. She envisioned
a society to provide women composers,
performers and writers on music with
the opportunity to come together to
learn, discuss and share in musical
matters.
By 1911, the year she
met Ivor Gurney, Marion had drawn her
friends Gertrude Eaton (1863-?) and
Katharine Eggar (1874-1961) into her
plans to establish the Society of Women
Musicians. She and Eaton had discussed
their strategy and drafted their agenda
earlier that year while on a spring
holiday in The New Forest.
In Eaton and Eggar,
Scott found compatible partners who
were willing to work with unflagging
commitment to match her own. Eaton had
trained as a singer in Italy and from
1894 to 1897 studied at the Royal College
of Music where she met Scott. Eaton
was the editor of the Royal Society
of Music Magazine and a voice teacher
who was also an active worker in prison
reform and in other movements that benefited
women and children. Eggar had studied
piano in Berlin and Brussels, and composition
with Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy
of Music. She had composed a number
of chamber works, including a piano
quintet and string quartet as well as
songs.
As the women envisioned
the society, it would promote a sense
of cooperation among women in different
fields of music, provide performance
opportunities and advice and would even
help women with the practical business
aspects of their work. Professional
women – performers, teachers, conductors,
composers – paid 15s. 6d. for a subscription
fee while non-professional women paid
one pound, £1 6s. to join. Marion’s
solicitor father Sydney Scott drew up
a constitution and rules for governing
the organization.(7) Marion produced
a full-sized book for keeping minutes
and an equally large account book and
ledger to record the SWM’s financial
transactions. The organization would
be professional in every way.
Before the society
was even launched, the women had their
critics who were quick to accuse them
of exclusivity, aggression and politics,
but they were ready for them. The founding
women and their Provisional Council
made it clear that the society would
have no political agenda and that it
would be open to men. Although she was
well aware of the inequities suffered
by women in male-dominated society,
Marion Scott was never antagonistic
toward men. ‘She always expected and
received their support, and had a completely
natural attitude … no one had more devoted
men friends,’ Katharine Eggar later
recalled.(8) During her teenage years
Marion had regularly accompanied her
parents to suffrage, temperance and
other social reform meetings where she
experienced men and women working together
cooperatively to achieve common goals,
an approach she would apply throughout
her life.
As dues-paying associate
members at five shillings a year, men
were invited to attend debates, performances
and meetings, and, as the organization
broadened even more, to have their music
performed at SWM concerts. Chamber music
promoter Walter W. Cobbett (1847-1937),
a successful businessman, amateur musician
and founder of the Cobbett Prize, was
the first benefactor of the organisation.
Composer-teacher Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946)
was the first associate member.(9) Cobbett
and Dunhill were among twenty male associates
to join in the first year. Ivor Gurney
also became a member. Thus the SWM operated
on an agenda of equality, its leaders
believing that their purpose was best
served by including, rather than excluding
men. Scott, the force behind this open
philosophy, achieved her goals through
a combination of ‘the ladylikeness of
a Liza Lehmann and the fighting nerve
of an Ethel Smyth’ who had become a
militant Suffragette.(10)
‘We were then in the
thick of the Women’s Suffrage battle
and anything determinedly feminine was
suspect,’ Eggar explained. ‘Facetiousness
about "the ladies" had to
be endured, and nice men hardly liked
to hear their [female] relations refer
to themselves and their friends as Women.’(11)
Even women, conditioned to a subservient
role, were fearful and reluctant to
take charge of their own lives when
opportunity presented itself.
‘The attitude of women
musicians to each other was on the whole
selfish,’ Eggar acknowledged. ‘Musicians
were not as awakened as women in other
professions, and badly needed a jolt
in their egotistical outlook.’ Marion
Scott provided the jolt while bearing
the brunt of dissent from within the
ranks. ‘She took the long view of the
Society’s role in musical life and never
wavered in her belief in its necessity.’
Said Eggar. (12)
The women held their
first meeting on 11 July 1911, at the
Women’s Institute, 92 Victoria Street.
More than 150 crowded into the room
and immediately joined the new organisation.
Others including Lady Elgar, violinist
May Harrison and singer Agnes Nicholls
(Mrs. Hamilton Harty) were among those
sending regrets that they were unable
to attend owing to previous commitments.
News of the event had spread rapidly
when Scott’s promotional skills resulted
in the publication of more than a dozen
articles in newspapers and magazines
including The Evening Standard
and St. James Gazette (a two-part
feature), The Daily Telegraph,
The Musical Times, The Musical
Courier, The Music Student,
The Musical Standard, and Musical
News.
Scott and Eggar collaborated
on the speech that Eggar, who served
as temporary chairman of the SWM and
as its designated public voice, delivered
at the inaugural event.(13) ‘We want
women with brains, but with hearts behind
their brains,’ Eggar declared in her
rallying call to the assembled women.
‘To some this idea of sex exclusiveness
is distasteful. There is a suggestion
that it has a political significance.
We wish the society to have none whatever.
We intend it to be a great factor in
the development of Art, and we feel
that that is a basis broad enough to
admit of all variety of political opinion.’
(14)
With women all around
them challenging convention, it was
time for musicians to do the same. Eggar
urged the women not to be content with
an ‘unquestioning acceptance of convention
or submission to abuses in music and
musical doings’, which often denied
them equality in ‘the monster of commercialism
that rules the musical world.’ The days
when women in music were doomed to a
silent destiny were over.
‘Here writers and performers
will be able to meet and measure their
art in co-operation,’ Eggar declared.
‘New lights will flash...the joy of
first hearing of her composition will
infuse courage and vitality into the
toil of the musical author. Work done
in the study will be no dumb phantom,
but a living vital creation.’
The audience cheered.
The women were triumphant. At the heart
of this visionary new enterprise stood
Marion Scott. The popular and highly
visible composer-singer Liza Lehmann
(1862-1918) served as the first SWM
president to be followed by Dr. Emily
Daymond, French pianist-composer Cécile
Chaminade and then Eggar (1914-1915),
Scott (1915-1916) and Eaton (1916-1917).(15)
Women in music could
finally believe in themselves and in
a future. They had found strength, courage
and hope in their unity. Their energy
was electric. In the first year, the
SWM membership explored a number of
topics: piano technique, French lyric
diction, Indian music, Polish folk songs,
brass instruments and the Music Copyright
Bill. They launched the annual Composer’s
Conference, formed a choir and closed
out their first year with a comfortable
bank balance.
The next year and subsequent
years were even more productive. The
women formed an orchestra and added
an Advisory Section to help young or
inexperienced musicians with their professional
careers. They began their popular private
and public concerts and a series of
Bach chamber concerts and inaugurated
Composers’ Trial Meetings, which offered
women an opportunity to submit their
compositions for criticism. They started
a library and formed an educational
committee. In 1916, the women recommended
that the Carnegie Trust publish works
by British composers rather than institute
the new school of music then under consideration
by the trustees. The Trust saw the wisdom
of the recommendation and inaugurated
the Carnegie Collection of British Music
which eventually included Ivor Gurney’s
Ludlow and Teme and Western
Playland (and of Sorrow).
During the war, the
women gave benefit concerts and raised
considerable amounts of money to aid
organizations from the Star and Garter
Fund to the YMCA. On 24 April 1918,
they held a fund-raising concert at
Wigmore Hall devoted entirely to compositions
by men who had joined the army. The
programme included Gurney’s ‘Severn
Meadows’, ‘All Night Under the Moon’
and ‘On Wenlock Edge’.
In an effort to cultivate
international cooperation, the SWM reached
out to women in other nations inviting
them to participate in programmes and
events in England. This outreach led
to an invitation to SWM members to exhibit
examples their compositions and writings
in the Women’s Section of the 1914 Leipzig
Exhibition. They participated in international
conferences. Members elected French
composer-pianist Cécile Chaminade
(1857-1944) to serve as SWM president
for the 1913-1914 term.
By 1918, the SWM had
earned such an enviable reputation that
music critic, editor and teacher Percy
A. Scholes regarded the organization
as ‘a model for men’.
‘Ask any mere man who
is struggling to engineer a progressive
movement in music where he gets his
most dependable support and he will
answer – the women,’ Scholes wrote.
‘It is the women who form the bulk of
the audience at a lecture of the Incorporated
Society of Musicians or the Music Teachers’
Association. It is the women who flock
to the Vacation Conferences on Musical
Education, and various Training Courses
for teachers.’ Scholes further observed
that men ‘quite unfairly’ reserved most
accommodations for themselves at other
venues because otherwise they ‘would
at once have been taken over by eager
women, all booking early in their anxiety
to meet our lecturers, sit at their
feet and learn some new thing.’(16)
Women in music had
made such important gains as professionals
since the inception of the SWM in 1911,
that The Music Student devoted
the entire May 1918 issue to ‘Women’s
Work in Music’. Scholes, founder and
editor of the publication, observed
that he had to limit the scope of the
issue to the work of British women because
women’s activities in music in Europe
and elsewhere were ‘too wide for treatment
in a single issue.’
The SWM had held its
first public concert in the ‘small’
Queen’s Hall on 25 January 1912, prompting
one anonymous critic to observe that
‘creative talent among women musicians
is becoming a power in the land’.(17)
The programme featured Eggar’s trio
Autumn Leaves for soprano, mezzo-soprano
and contralto; two movements from Ethel
Smyth’s E minor quartet; Ethel Barns’
Fantasy Trio and songs
by Marion Scott, Liza Lehmann, Maud
Valerie White, Lucie Johnstone and Mabel
Saumares Smith. These concerts became
regular events at Aeolian, Wigmore and
Queen’s halls and soon began to feature
compositions by male associate members
including Ivor Gurney, Arthur Bliss,
Gustav Holst, Thomas Dunhill and music
by men outside the Society like W. Denis
Browne (1888-1915), who had died at
Gallipoli.
Marion had known of
Browne before the war and possibly had
met him in May 1914 when he lectured
on ‘Modern Harmonic Tendencies’ at the
Royal Musical Association of which she
and her father were members. During
the war, she carried on a correspondence
with Browne’s mother who was eager to
have her son’s music performed. However,
Marion ran into an obstacle when she
approached Browne’s musical executor
Edward J. Dent who made it clear that
he was ‘unwilling to let the Society
of Women Musicians have the songs’.(18)
Scott, a very persuasive woman, managed
to convince Dent to meet her. Fully
aware of his reticence she expected
him to send her on her way in ten
minutes but she stayed for two hours
as Dent ‘turned out thing after thing
of Denis Browne’. She was amazed by
‘their individuality and latent power’.
Scott included the song ‘Dream-tryst’
in the April 1918 SWM concert devoted
to music by soldier-composers at Wigmore
Hall.
The
music programmes featured many premieres
of works by women composers, providing
them the opportunity denied to so many
of their predecessors – that of actually
hearing their music performed. Among
them were Liza Lehmann, Ethel Smyth,
Dorothy Howell, Rebecca Clarke, Katharine
Eggar, Marion Scott, Ethel Barns, Fiona
McCleary, and later Elizabeth Poston,
Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy
and Ruth Gipps.
Education
remained a core function of the SWM.
In addition to the society’s own library,
the women added a free library of British
chamber music when W. W. Cobbett entrusted
them with his own comprehensive collection
of scores dating from as early as the
16th century.(19) The annual
Composers’ Conference featured two days
of papers, the first day reserved for
members and the second day open to guests.
As always these gatherings included
men and featured comments and debate.
For example, in 1920, Gustav Holst presented
his paper on ‘The Education of Composers’,
after which members Arthur Bliss, Jane
Joseph and Adine O’Neill (wife of Norman
O’Neill) led a discussion. The following
year, 1921, in a session focussed on
contemporary music, Hester Stansfeld
Prior considered ‘Some Characteristics
of Scriabin’ while Marion Scott discussed
‘The Revival of Modes in Modern Music’
and Arthur Bliss explored ‘What Contemporary
Composition is Aiming At’.
After
the death of Liza Lehmann in 1918, the
SWM established the Liza Lehmann Memorial
Fund to provide grants to members in
need of financial assistance. In later
years the society established prizes
with cash awards to help women further
their careers, particularly as composers.
By 1920, the SWM had
outgrown 92 Victoria Street and had
moved to larger quarters at 74 Grosvenor
Street. In less than a decade, interrupted
by a long war that nearly derailed the
organisation, the women had made enormous
strides. Marion Scott had opened the
fields of music criticism and musicology
to women through her own pioneering
work.(20) Women were finding venues
for their compositions, enjoying success
as instrumentalists, educators and writers
while others were launching solo careers.
Despite these advances,
women still found it difficult to secure
paying positions in orchestras. When
the BBC announced the formation of it
symphony orchestra in the late 1920s,
the women were determined to be included
in it. A delegation led by Marion Scott
approached BBC Music Director Percy
Pitt in his office. Using calm reason
and diplomacy they convinced him that
the conductor Adrian Boult should hear
all applicants from behind a screen
and judge them on the merits of their
performance, not dismiss them because
of their gender. As a result an increasing
number of contracts went to women. (21)
The women had cracked another barrier
but it would still be many years before
men accepted women as equal partners
in an orchestra.
By the time the Society
of Women Musicians disbanded in 1972,
women had come a long way since the
spring of 1911 when Marion Scott and
Gertrude Eaton spent their holiday quietly
working on a plan that would change
the course of music history. As Kathleen
Eggar later observed: ‘It is difficult
for the young woman musician of today
to realize what imagination, courage
and enterprise were needed to carry
out such a plan in 1911’. (22) Marion
Scott led the way. Through her vision,
her willingness to take risks and her
tenacity, she opened new paths for others
to explore and follow. She showed women
that they could compete with any man,
that their work had value and that their
dreams could become reality. She gave
them hope and courage of their own to
challenge convention and fight injustice.
Marion continued her
association with the Society of Women
Musicians until her death from cancer
in December 1953. In the summer of 1954,
the SWM arranged a special Composers
Conference to pay tribute to Marion
Scott and to honour her work as a critic
and musicologist and as a champion of
women and British music.
Katharine Eggar who
had known Marion more than forty years
offered her assessment of her friend’s
influence.
‘First there was the
remarkable clarity and wisdom of her
judgment, which was simply invaluable,’
Eggar said. ‘Secondly, her loyalty as
a colleague and friend. Thirdly, the
example of her perfect integrity. Fourthly,
her fine manners. In short,’ Eggar concluded,
‘we may think of her as our tuning-fork,
and test our pitch by hers.’(23)
A note about Katharine
Eggar
Although Marion Scott
and Katharine Eggar were close friends
who had collaborated as writers and
worked together to champion women in
music, they were not always in agreement,
particularly in regard to the identity
of Shakespeare. In addition to her writings
on music, Eggar also became a literary
critic and spent more than thirty years
researching the life and times of Edward
de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Eggar
believed that de Vere was the real author
of Shakespeare's works, that ‘Shakespeare’
was his nom de plume. She planned to
publish her findings but died before
she completed her book. In an interview
shortly before her death, Eggar described
herself as a ‘heretic on Shakespeare’.
Marion Scott disagreed with Eggar and
others seeking to attribute Shakespeare’s
work to different writers. ‘Why in the
name of wonder any one should think
that only the highest social position
can produce genius – in short that Bacon
[or anyone else] wrote Shakespeare --
is incomprehensible. The evidence, if
any, is in the other direction,’ Scott
declared in her 1934 biography of Beethoven.
Eggar’s work on de Vere is housed at
the University of London Library.
© Pamela Blevins 2007
Notes
- Marion Scott, "Music as a Profession",
The Daily Express, 1909 (no
date), p. 1. Scott either wrote or
contributed to a book entitled Work
for Women, which sold for one
penny and was available from all bookstalls
and newsagents.
- Ibid.
- The Harrisons were sisters. May
Mukle’s sister Florence played the
double bass and bassoon. Their mother
was a pianist who also played the
double bass while Lilian Mukle defied
convention when she took up the trumpet.
- In 1910, Ethel Smyth decided to
take two years off from her own work
to devote time to the suffrage cause.
She became involved in Mrs. Pankhurst’s
Women’s Social and Political Union.
In 1911, Smyth composed The March
for Women, which became the battle
hymn of the suffragettes. In 1912,
Smyth was arrested for throwing a
rock or brick through a window in
the home of Colonial Secretary, Lord
Harcourt. She was sentenced to two
months in prison but served only three
weeks. Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884)
was the first British woman to compose
symphonies. Knowing that her chances
of ever hearing her large-scale works
were virtually nil, she wisely joined
the Musical Society of London as a
lady associate. Performances were
one benefit of membership, even for
a woman.
- One such governess cared for the
young Ethel Smyth who recalled sitting
under the piano entranced as her governess
played a Beethoven piano sonata. From
that ‘glorious moment’ on, music became
Smyth’s all-consuming passion.
- Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) is often
cited as Stanford’s first female pupil
but this is erroneous. Marion Scott,
Mary Wurm (1860-1938) and Katherine
Ramsay, later the Duchess of Athol,
all preceding Clarke as Stanford’s
pupils by many years. Clarke began
her studies with Stanford in 1907,
some 11 years after Scott had begun
hers.
- Sydney Scott donated his services
to the SWM until his death in 1936.
- Katharine Eggar, ‘Marion Scott as
Founder of the Society of Women Musicians’,
Society of Women Musicians’ Commemoration
of Marion Scott programme book,
June 1954, p. 4.
- Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937)
was the founder and chairman of the
successful Scandinavia Belting, Ltd.
A fine violinist who had his own quartet,
he championed chamber music and commissioned
chamber works by British composers.
He established the Cobbett Medal for
services to chamber music in 1924.
He was the editor of the Cyclopaedic
Survey of Chamber Music first
published in 1929. Thomas Dunhill
(1877-1946), composer, writer and
teacher, who like Marion Scott, was
a student of Sir Charles Stanford
at the RCM where they met.
- Eggar, op. cit., p. 5.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Scott and Eggar formed a writing
partnership and published a series
of articles on women in chamber music
for the chamber music supplement of
The Music Student.
- Subsequent quotes from Eggar’s inaugural
speech are taken from the Society
of Women Musicians promotional material
appearing in a number of publications
in July and August 1911.
- Among the first women associated
with the SWM were May Mukle, Lucie
Johnstone (whose songs composed under
the pseudonym ‘Lewis Carey’ were popular),
Florence MacNaughton, Mabel Saumarez
Smith, Ethel Smyth, Maud Valerie White
and Ethel Barns. Emily Daymond was
the first woman to earn a doctorate
in music (Oxford 1901).
- Percy A. Scholes, ‘The Society of
Women Musicians – A Model for Men’,
The Music Student, May 1918,
p. 335.
- Anonymous, ‘Women’s Genius in Music’,
Daily Express, 26 January 1912.
- Draft of a Marion Scott letter to
Ivor Gurney, Gurney Archive.
- Cobbett bequeathed the collection
to them.
- Marion Scott had begun her work
in musicology via a series of lectures
on the history of British music that
she developed before she founded the
SWM. Her lectures included folk music
from England, Scotland, Ireland and
Wales, medieval and church music,
early composers, Elizabethan and Tudor
music and the ‘Renaissance of English
Music and its leaders in the latter
half of the 19th century’.
Although she was not able to publish
her brilliant early scholarship, she
did keep typed copies of her texts
that I plan to include in a future
volume of her writings. Marion began
her career as a critic in 1919 as
the London correspondent for the highly
respected Boston-based, international
daily The Christian Science Monitor.
Once she broke down the barriers against
women in both these fields, other
women followed her lead.
- The male myth would have us believe
that the women had not won a victory
at all with the BBC. "They could
always tell it was a woman by the
click of her high heels" is the
oft-repeated slight even today when
the subject of this victory is brought
up. The fact is that the women were
not stupid. They knew what they were
up against and most made certain that
tell-tale signs that she was a woman
were not present, including noisy
shoes and perfume. Scott knew Adrian
Boult and had written about him. Even
today some orchestras still refuse
to admit women to their ranks except
as harpists. Women conductors have
only recently begun to earn recognition
and serve as principal conductors
of orchestras. The American Marin
Alsop has made more advances than
her contemporaries and recently, after
much controversy, became the principal
conductor of the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra.
- Eggar, op. cit., SWM Commemoration,
p. 4.
- Ibid., p. 6.
Sources
Marion Scott and Society of Women Musicians
archives at the Royal College of Music
The Library of Congress
The Christian Science Monitor
The Music Student
The Musical Times