Vignette I—
The Power of Social Events:
Aaron Copland's Guest List for a Post-Concert Reception Given by Blanche Walton

Annotated by Carol J. Oja

Sometime during the spring of 1930, Aaron Copland sent Blanche Walton a handwritten list of suggested guests for an after-concert party, presumably given at her New York apartment.^[1] The list provides an unusual view of how the social events hosted by women helped composers build power bases. Although the document is undated, it was probably drawn up for a party after the Copland-Sessions concert on 13 April 1930. There were a number of Hungarians among the invitees—the Hungarian consul general, the violinist Leopold Auer, the violinist and composer Sándor Harmati—and the program that evening included three new Hungarian works, István Szelényi's Recitative , Pál Kadosa's Sonatina , and Imre Weisshaus's Piano Study . Walton may well have had a personal interest in these young Hungarians perhaps through Béla Bartók, who stayed with her during his 1927 visit to the United States. The probability that the reception followed this April 1930 concert is further strengthened by the presence of the Polish violinist and composer Joseph Achron on the guest list, for the young Polish composer Jerzy Fitelberg's Piano Sonata No. 2 appeared on the same program. Also performed were Roy Harris's String Quartet and Israel Citkowitz's Five Songs from "Chamber Music" by James Joyce and Sonatina for Piano.^[2]

Copland and Roger Sessions had founded their concert series two years earlier "in the interests of the younger generation of American composers," hoping to provide the same service for their contemporaries that the League of Composers offered to older Americans and Europeans.^[3] They also reached out occasionally to young composers abroad, especially in this particular 1930 program. Largely funded by Mary Senior Churchill, another of modernism's unsung female supporters, the Copland-Sessions Concerts lasted for three years, giving eight programs in New York and one each in Paris and London.

Copland's choices for the party hosted by Walton reveal a shrewd political sense. The guests included leaders of the League of Composers (Claire Reis and her husband, Arthur, as well as their co-founders Emerson Whithorne and Frederick Jacobi),^[4] concert managers

(especially Arthur Judson and F. C. Coppicus, two of the most important of the day), and the press (especially the British critic and composer Leigh Henry and Robert Simon of the New Yorker ). Other subtexts resonate from the list as well. For example, Citkowitz's Five Songs , which appeared on the April program, was published that same year by Alma Morgenthau Wertheim's Cos Cob Press, and she appears on the party list, as does Whithorne, who in addition to his role in the league was one of her principal advisors.