Women As Patrons

In 1925 George Antheil, a young American composer soon to become celebrated for his audacity, wrote to Mary Louise Curtis Bok, the woman who had been financing his work for several years. While his outcry was typically histrionic, it articulated the central economic issue for his generation: "If you want composers like Beethoven or Chopin, you shall have to be prepared to do what the princes of other days did for these people. The joke of it is that the rich and wealthy people of our States want these thing[s] without paying for them [underlined twice]. For nothing ! The princes of other days had to pay for them. So will the princes of today."^[4]

Antheil made his appeal, of course, to the American equivalent not of a prince but of a princess , as would so many of his contemporaries. Women, more than men, stepped forward as patrons. Whether Mary Louise Curtis Bok in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in Washington, D.C., or Alma Morgenthau Wertheim in New York City, women of means put their energy and dollars behind young, often experimental, composers. This was not just a musical phenomenon or an American one: wealthy European women subsidized the avant-garde in music, and women on both sides of the Atlantic supported writers and visual artists. Private patronage experienced a major revival during the 1920s. In Paris, for example, the princesse de Polignac (an American from the Singer sewing-machine family) supported Igor Stravinsky; he dedicated his Piano Sonata of 1924 to her, and many of his new compositions received private auditions in her salon. She also subsidized Ravel and Satie, among others.^[5] A legion of wealthy women

also supported writers and painters of the period—for example, Lady Gregory, who financed Yeats; Harriet Shaw Weaver, who subsidized Joyce; and Mabel Dodge Luhan, who supported D. H. Lawrence and others. In discussing early-twentieth-century modernist writers—both European and American—the literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have observed: "A striking characteristic of the twentieth-century avant-garde, after all, was its determinedly anti-commercial cast. Perhaps there has been no circle of writers since the sixteenth century which was more dependent on private patronage, and, like such sixteenth-century figures as Sidney and Spenser, many prominent modernists were subsidized by a series of wealthy women or publicized by a set of powerful women."^[6]

Such was certainly the case among concert-music composers in New York, where Whitney, Wertheim, and Walton provided essential financial help and moral support. Yet for Americans, private patronage of composers was a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, as an American wealthy class rose to prominence through expanding railroads, mines, and industry, it became involved in supporting cultural improvement. However, in music that support most often had gone toward performance, not composition, and its focus had been on the European repertory.^[7] Just as the notion of being a patron was modeled on European precedents, so was the choice of music to promote. The same applied to the patronage of American museums: supporting European masterworks brought a cachet of sophistication and cultivation. Therefore America's wealthy citizens munificently funded the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and Carnegie Hall. With the exception of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who in Boston at the turn of the century subsidized Charles Martin Loeffler, patrons paid little attention to native composers.

Things began changing in the late 1910s, especially with the work of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and by the early 1920s patronage of composers had become more frequent. Many patrons continued to support the performance of European masterworks. Yet others reached out to composers, and they made quite a difference. Suddenly an ambitious group of young musicians did not need to spend time earning a living outside of composition, as had William Billings who worked as a tanner in late eighteenth-century Boston, or Charles Ives who built a successful insurance business in early-twentieth-century New York. Instead they could devote themselves fully to practicing their art.

Gertrude Whitney, Alma Wertheim, and Blanche Walton, then, were continuing an old tradition but giving it a new twist. Each allied herself with a different faction of the avant-garde, and each shaped her giving in an individual way. Yet all sought personal satisfaction by contributing to a cause that seemed both adventuresome and important.

Although remembered primarily as a patron of visual artists, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942) advanced modernism in America in a variety of art forms,

including music. An accomplished sculptor, she was a major benefactor of the famous 1913 Armory Show, through which European modernist painting first reached New York, and she later founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her involvement in music, while brief, had a similar purpose: to promote modernism in a society reluctant to accept it. Beginning in the late 1910s, she championed the music of Edgard Varèse and helped support his ill-fated New Symphony Orchestra, which served as one of music's answers to the Armory Show by revealing works of European modernists, such as Alfredo Casella and Béla Bartók, that were unknown to New Yorkers.^[8] Later Whitney became "one of the principal sponsors" of Varèse's International Composers' Guild.^[9]

In embracing philanthropy, Whitney followed the example of older members of her family, most of whom were male, at the same time as she sought personal satisfaction. Among the inheritors of the Vanderbilt family fortune, built on ships and railroads, she expanded her financial base by marrying Harry Payne Whitney, whose money lay largely in oil and tobacco. Yet in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Whitney turned to living artists as the target of her gifts, she chose her own version of the family's philanthropic mission, which had centered on major institutions such as Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For her, patronage became a way of relieving what the historian Anne Firor Scott has described as "the inchoate sense of uselessness which afflicted young women of leisure."^[10] It also became her weapon for dealing with an unhappy marriage. After bearing children and submitting herself to the constraints of New York's high society, Whitney began to seem like a wealthy counterpart of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth , whom Wharton characterized as "so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate."^[11] Whitney struggled with those chains, waging a moral battle against the limitations of privilege. In 1901 she wrote in her journal of feeling useless: "I pity, I pity above all that class of people who have no necessity to work. . . . [The wealthy are] the great and grand unemployed—the dregs of humanity."^[12] Whitney wanted to avoid such immobility, turning to both sculpture and patronage as a means of finding fulfillment.

Whitney's support of Varèse appears to have been her primary activity in new music. Besides helping to underwrite his performance organizations, in 1921 she gave him what has been described by his wife, Louise, as "an adequate allowance" so that he would not have to take a job. She also hosted after-concert parties and lectures.^[13] But details of her substantial support of the International Composers' Guild remain obscure. Louise Varèse shares some information in her account of the early years of the guild, as does B. H. Friedman, Whitney's biographer.^[14] Little else about Whitney's contribution survives in her papers, however, and Varèse's personal correspondence remains inaccessible to scholars.^[15]

Because information about Whitney's music patronage is so spotty, her importance could easily be diminished. Yet her assistance in launching the first major organization for American modernist composers made her one of the earliest pa-

trons to subsidize new music in New York. She simply extended the support she was giving visual artists to those who wrote music. Whitney's efforts in the late 1910s and early 1920s helped turn the attention of American music patrons away from support for the performance of European classics and toward the encouragement of creative ventures.

Alma Morgenthau Wertheim (1887–1953) expanded on the work that Gertrude Whitney had begun. Among several subsidiary financers of Whitney's big cause, the International Composers' Guild, Wertheim went on to become a substantial underwriter of both composers and new-music organizations.^[16] Although Whitney's deepest connection had been to the visual arts and her direct participation in music projects—outside of financial support—had been slight, Wertheim took much more of a music-focused, hands-on approach. She was among the dissenters who broke from the International Composers' Guild in 1923 to form the League of Composers, and she became an active member of the league's board. She even founded her own publishing firm for issuing new scores.^[17]

In yet another contrast to Whitney, Wertheim's work as a music patron has been better documented, but its sources are still scattered. The Morgenthau archive at the Library of Congress contains materials mostly about male family members, especially Alma's father, the financier and ambassador Henry Morgenthau, and her brother, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who became Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt.^[18] Thus information about Alma's legacy largely comes from the files of composers—especially Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Louis Gruenberg—and from interviews with Claire Reis and Minna Lederman, two women with whom she worked at the league. Even her daughters (who included the late historian Barbara Tuchman) saved few of her papers.^[19]

Wertheim's efforts took several forms. First there were contributions to organizations. In addition to providing cash to both the guild and the league, she also underwrote the league's journal, Modern Music , for several years.^[20] Then there were her stipends to individual composers, most of whom fell within the league's orbit. Aaron Copland was a central recipient of her help and became a kind of hub around which her patronage spun.^[21] Ironically, considering that the new-music movement focused on breaking with the past, Copland's link to Wertheim began within the social conventions of old New York. In 1925 he made at least two pilgrimages to her Upper East Side apartment for tea. Both times he played some of his music, and as a result she handed him a check for $1,000. Copland later recalled, "I don't know how, without that, I would have managed in the year that followed while I was composing Music for the Theatre ."^[22] Wertheim helped others as well. She presented Roy Harris with at least $1,800 so that he could study with Nadia Boulanger, and she provided smaller cash stipends to Israel Citkowitz, among others.^[23]

The third aspect of Wertheim's work was by far the most monumental: the founding of Cos Cob Press in 1929 (see frontispiece), which in the next nine years

published some thirty-five volumes of music by young Americans—music that commercial houses would never have considered releasing. With this effort Wertheim took a bold risk. Cos Cob Press gained distinction as Copland's first major American publisher, and it also gave publication premieres to Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson.^[24] Wertheim underwrote the expenses of the press entirely, and through it she joined other women, especially in Paris, who were publishing the work of young writers. For example, Nancy Cunard ran The Hours Press in the late 1920s, counting Samuel Beckett among her major literary discoveries, and Caresse Crosby started Black Sun Press with her husband, Harry, and managed it singlehandedly after his death.^[25] Wertheim assumed a similar function, not only funding her press, but being involved in its operation. She designed the cover used for the scores and had some say in the pieces chosen.

Yet Wertheim's relationship to composers was highly volatile. Minna Lederman, a member with Wertheim of the league's board, has described her as "a very special figure in her own circle . . . with beautiful taste for decor, personal and otherwise, and a very hot, passionate temperament."^[26] That passion appears to have directed her patronage. Just as her tenure with the guild had ended explosively, so it did with the league. In the November-December 1928 issue of Modern Music , Wertheim's name did not appear in the list of the league's executive board. It never reappeared. According to Claire Reis, Wertheim resigned because of a confrontation over the design of Modern Music and a belief that her opinions were not being taken seriously by the board.^[27] The next year she struck out on her own and founded Cos Cob Press.

Blanche Wetherill Walton (1871–1963) presents an altogether different case. Whereas Whitney allied herself with Varèse, and Wertheim with Copland and his circle, Walton befriended another faction of the new-music community: Henry Cowell and some of his colleagues, including Ruth Crawford, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger. By no means as wealthy as Whitney or Wertheim, she gave modest cash stipends. Her largest contribution came through offering composers housing and presiding over a kind of salon for modernists. In other words, she used the traditional female domain of the home to help the struggling avant-garde, becoming a kind of domestic impresario. Carl Ruggles acknowledged the value of her work in a 1928 letter, "Keep on, and you will become such a power in musical circles that all we poor, damned composers will have to do is to take our scores and our troubles to you and everything will be 'velvet.'"^[28]

Like Whitney and Wertheim, Walton took up her work as part of a search for personal satisfaction. Unlike them, she had professional potential as a musician. A gifted pianist who had studied with Edward MacDowell, she was later described by Henry Cowell as "a pianist of professional calibre in the days when a public career was unthinkable for a girl of good family."^[29] Instead, after raising two chil-

Fig. 25.
Marion Walton Putnam and Blanche Walton in the early 1930s.
Photograph in the collection of Marion Walton Putnam.

dren, she sought a new life in contemporary music, and her various New York apartments—in Bronxville, at West Sixty-Eighth Street and Central Park West, and in Washington Square—became havens for experimentalists. Walton later recalled: "The one contribution I could make to the gifted and struggling pioneer composer was to turn my apartment on Central Park West into a meeting place. It was then a shabby elderly house which had a large corner room which proved to be excellent for a music room with Steinway piano. My rooms were comfortably apart which left other rooms for visiting composers of whom Cowell was a frequent one."^[30] Walton's path to patronage came about through two principal contacts: with Edward De Coppet, her husband's employer, who as a major early-twentieth-century patron founded and supported the Flonzaley Quartet, and with Cowell, whom she met through the singer Radiana Pazmor during a visit to California in the early 1920s.^[31]

Walton was involved in the modernist movement from the very beginning of the 1920s. A few remaining letters, part of a small collection of her papers at the New York Public Library, suggest the dimensions of her efforts.^[32] She gave money to the International Composers's Guild and helped support Cowell's New Music Society and its various offshoots, especially New Music Editions.^[33] Principally, though, she established a kind of boardinghouse for vanguardists. Bartók used her West Sixty-Eighth Street apartment as a base during his 1927 tour of the United States; Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell stayed with her for long periods during

their many trips to New York; and during the winter of 1929–30, the young Ruth Crawford lived with Walton while she began studying with Charles Seeger. The first meeting of what would become the American Musicological Society was also held at her apartment in 1930.^[34]

Walton's private musicales served an important function for the young modernists. In early December 1929, for example, she arranged an informal concert in her apartment for Ruth Crawford, which featured the premiere of Crawford's Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano.^[35] Another musicale, probably scheduled that same year, centered on Aaron Copland's work, suggesting that Walton's generosity extended beyond the circle surrounding Henry Cowell.^[36]

Because Walton did not take on huge financial responsibilities with new music, like Whitney and Wertheim, or step forward as an outspoken activist, as will be seen with Claire Reis, her legacy is more difficult to assess. Measured against today's standards of feminine achievement, her work might easily be devalued because of its domestic nature. Yet by establishing a base of operation for struggling young composers and by hosting musicales, as well as after-concert parties, she gave essential assistance. In 1959, Henry Cowell paid tribute to Walton, calling her "one of the most important and best beloved sponsors that modern music has had here." He went on to pinpoint the substance of her contribution: "Much of the activity of composers of modern music was centered in her home, and we owe to her hospitality an early focusing of modern musical thought in New York. She created a stimulating atmosphere where nothing but generosity toward divergent ideas was possible."^[37]

As patrons, then, these women provided the support necessary for composers to write, publish, and perform new works. While their gifts took different forms—whether giving stipends to individual composers, subsidizing performance organizations, underwriting the publication of music and journals, hosting social functions after concerts, presenting musicales, or housing composers—they shared a commitment to advancing modernism in America. Yet an important part of their role as patrons was to stay modestly in the background. Louise Varèse called Gertrude Whitney "self-effacing," and the same adjective could be applied in varying degrees to all three.^[38] A woman's place as patron was to be generous as well as selfless. Her creative energy went into discovering and encouraging others, not into drawing attention to her own work. No matter how crucial her role, it fit into a well-established hierarchy based on gender and occupation, making her subsidiary to the mostly male composers she aided.