1. SHD, unpublished memoir, untitled typescript (henceforth cited as SHD, Memoir), 195. I am most grateful to Dr. Henry Drinker of Northampton, Massachusetts, for obtain- soft

ing a copy of this memoir for me, and to members of the family for permitting me to quote from it. A copy is also available in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.: Sophie Hutchinson Drinker Papers, carton 1, addendum 84-M182.

2. Sophie Drinker, Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music (New York: Coward-McCann, 1948). The epigraph to this chapter is from p. 251.

3. SHD, Memoir, 26.

4. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Family Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 62.

5. SHD, Memoir, 29.

6. Ibid., 35. Her daughter Cecilia Saltonstall believes that Sophie's parents refused to allow her to attend college (personal interview, 16 October 1990, 7; transcripts of this interview and of one with Ernesta Drinker Ballard are now available in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.).

7. SHD, diary entry for 23 January 1927 (unpaged). The diaries are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College: Sophie Hutchinson Drinker Papers, carton 1, addendum 84-M96, folders 3-6. Quoted by permission.

8. SHD, Memoir, 36.

9. Sophie and Harry's children grew up under the considerable pressure of belonging to two prominent families. Their daughter Ernesta Ballard wryly explained to me that the Drinkers were important because they were achievers, and the Hutchinsons because of their blue blood (personal interview, 6 December 1990, 5).

10. See Bowen, Family Portrait , ch. 4. On the association of music with the feminine, see Judith Tick, "Charles Ives and Gender Ideology," in Musicology and Diffidence: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship , ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 83-106, and the extensive bibliography provided there. That Harry Drinker's father was concerned, for just this reason, about his absorption in music is revealed in Bowen, Family Portrait , 60-61.

11. "The Strenuous Life," speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, 10 April 1899; available in many collections of Roosevelt's speeches. Harry Drinker was a senior at Haverford College and a football star in 1899, when "a rage for competitive athletics and for out-of-doors activities of all kinds was sweeping the campuses of the nation" (John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s," in The Origins of Modern Consciousness , ed. John Weiss [Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1965], 26). American men were "sent to the Dakotas for rough-riding exercise cures" in contrast to the rest cures prescribed for "nervous" women of the period, Tom Lutz notes in American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32.

12. These records also offer tantalizing glimpses of the endless curiosities of cultural self-improvement presented to (mostly) women of Drinker's class in this period: she attended, among countless other offerings, a lecture on jazz by Olga Samaroff (26 January 1930) and "an exhibition of dancing & singing as it is supposed to have been done in Aeschylus' time" given by "an American lady . . . with bare feet" (15 April 1928). On Salome, see Lawrence Kramer, "Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex," Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 269-94.

13. The partbooks are now in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. They are the basis of SHD's 1952 book, Brahms and His Women's Choruses (privately published).

14. HSD to Sydney Greenbie, 8 May 1947. Sydney and Marjorie Greenbie Collection, Special Collections, Knight Library, University of Oregon. I am grateful to the Knight Library staff for their assistance in finding materials for me, and for permission to quote them. Of Harry's service on the Juilliard Board, from 1941 to 1961, Sophie writes, "his chief contribution there was, as elsewhere, interest in broadening the base of musical experience and culture by treating the non-professional music lover seriously. He retired when the policy of the Directors changed and when the Juilliard School gave up their department for training amateurs" (Memoir, 147).

15. See Nancy B. Reich, "Women as Musicians: A Question of Class," in Musicology and Difference , ed. Solie, 125-46.

16. SHD, Diary, 16 June 1933.

17. SHD, Music and Women , 244.

18. SHD, Memoir, 111.

19. The singing parties are described in SHD's memoir, pp. 111-16; Bowen, chapter 11; HSD, "Singing Together for Musical Experience," Music and Letters 14 (1933): 364-68; and Nora Waln, "The Sunday after Korea," Atlantic Monthly 187 (May 1951): 23-26. After 1960, when they ended, the Drinkers also privately published a list of those who had participated over the years, with the repertory they performed, entitled Accademia dei dilettanti di musica, 1930-1960 (privately published).

20. SHD, Memoir, 152.

21. SHD, Diary, 16 June 1933.

22. SHD to Marjorie Greenbie, 12 September [1946], Greenbie Collection, University of Oregon.

23. Bowen, Family Portrait , 58-59.

24. Along with Archibald T. Davison, Augustus Zanzig, and others, Surette was the source of the Concord Series of school and community song books, which the Drinkers used regularly in family singing (Ballard interview, 4).

25. Thomas Whitney Surette, Music and Life: A Study of the Relations between Ourselves and Music (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 107, 103, and xii; emphasis in original.

26. D. G. Mason, foreword, in Augustus Delafield Zanzig, Music in American Life, Present and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), v. And see also Eric Clarke, Music in Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 1935).

27. Robert A. Gerson, "Music in Philadelphia" (Ph. D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1940), 255, 268. For a discussion of another line of attack in the campaign, see Linda L. Tyler, "Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand': Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930," Journal of the American Musicological Society 45 (1992): 75-120.

28. HSD, "Amateurs and Music" (address delivered at the North Central Music Educators Conference, Indianapolis, 19 March 1935), 11.

29. Tick, "Charles Ives and Gender Ideology," 102.

30. Waln, "Sunday after Korea."

31. Bowen, Family Portrait , 201.

32. When I asked Ernesta Ballard if regular participants could bring friends or house guests along with them, she replied that "nobody ever did that more than once" (Ballard interview, 7).

33. SHD, Memoir, 113-14. HSD describes the ground rules similarly in "Singing Together." Note that if Sophie's phrase "close harmony" refers to barbershop-style singing by the "impromptu male quartets," this prohibition supports the suspicion that vernacular musics were not thought by the Drinkers to advance their campaign of uplift. It points as well to their willingness to substitute their taste for the presumably unenlightened preferences of their guests.

34. HSD, "Singing Together," 365.

35. SHD, Memoir, 14; emphasis in original. Cecilia Saltonstall intended to pursue a career in performance at the Juilliard School or the Curtis Institute, but was strenuously discouraged by her parents (Saltonstall interview, 3, 8).

36. On the preoccupation with democracy, see, for instance, Burton W. Peretti, "Democratic Leitmotivs in the American Reception of Wagner," Nineteenth-Century Music 13 (1989): 28-38. With regard to American cultural jingoism, Lawrence Levine quotes a 1902 newspaper review commenting favorably on John Philip Sousa's band because "the average man can pronounce the names of the members of the organization" (Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988], 238). T.J. Jackson Lears has written about the intense ambivalence arising from—among other causes—problematic gender identities around 1900: "the loss of equipoise made selfhood seem more diffuse and problematic than ever before" ( No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1981], 222). It is striking that throughout her memoir, correspondence, and diaries, Sophie Drinker repeatedly uses the word "poise"—not in the beauty-pageant sense familiar now, but to describe a kind of mental and spiritual equilibrium she found difficult to maintain when tired or to reestablish after some upheaval in the family. She found it, later in life, in her intellectual work.

37. SHD, Memoir, 116.

38. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow . Of course, the conflation of art with the sacred so characteristic of romanticism and its offshoots has long been recognized and extensively studied; but Levine's particular focus on shifts in American culture and his explication of the sacralization phenomenon in association with changing class relations make his a particularly useful model for my purposes.

39. Harry and Sophie neither went to movies nor owned a radio; they heard no popular music or jazz, nor did they attend Broadway musicals. They both read exhaustively, but Ernesta Ballard told me that they had no interest in novels.

40. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow , 213.

41. Ibid., 146.

42. Joseph A. Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation: A Social History of Music in America, 1870-1900 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971).

43. In any event, Levine points out that twentieth-century Americans have never understood this aspect of their cultural past ( Highbrow/Lowbrow , 241).

44. Lears, No Place of Grace , 53.

45. SHD, Diary, 11 May 1931.

46. Sixteen bound (unpaged) notebooks containing Drinker's research notes for Music and Women are in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. The same notes, organized somewhat differently and bound in eighteen volumes, are housed in the Special Collections of the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. The notes are in typescript, and both sets appear to be carbon copies, although they also contain inserted newspaper clippings, programs, correspondence, and so forth. The Pennsylvania set is especially full of original documents, including a letter from Amy Beach written just before her death. It is known that Drinker prepared these notebooks especially for deposit at Smith College, and that she employed a secretary at this time.

47. HSD, letter sent to the Philadelphia Public Ledger , 21 February 1916, quoted in full in SHD, Memoir, 46-47. Sophie's diaries occasionally mention Stokowski's controversial reception in Philadelphia, but I have not seen any indication of the Drinkers' own opinions of him.

48. SHD, Music and Women , 3-4.

49. Ibid., 297, 289-93.

50. Levine Highbrow/Lowbrow , 211.

51. Ibid., 189.

52. Mary Ritter Beard to Margaret Storrs Grierson, 6 March 1944. Mary Beard Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; quoted by permission. In fact, notes scattered throughout Drinker's notebooks indicate the same uncertainty about who should be offered payment that marked the family's earlier interactions with performers. There is no doubt, however, that Sophie Drinker's financial situation was crucial in enabling her to work as an amateur on Music and Women . In a later letter Mary Beard identified one of those "other assets" of Sophie's that were perhaps unavailable to herself and her husband Charles in their own publications: "She will have 64 illustrations too! This feature is made possible by her husband's aid and comfort—so costly you know" (MRB to MSG, 25 July 1947).

53. As a member of the board of The Sheltering Arms, a home for unwed mothers, Sophie had hired from her own pocket a choral conductor for the "girls," who, however, did not appreciate the favor (SHD, diary, undated entry sometime in August 1926).

54. SHD, Memoir, 134.

55. Ibid., 179.

56. A more thorough discussion of Harry Drinker's intentions in making these translations appears in Samuel R. Rosenbaum, Henry S. Drinker: An Amateur of Music (a talk given on the occasion of HSD's receiving the 1958 Annual Tripos Award of the American Concert Choir and Choral Foundation, published as a supplement to the foundation's Bulletin "as a tribute from a small group of friends"), a copy of which is in the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

57. SHD never, however, argued that they were entirely so. Like many present-day feminists, Drinker faced what is now known as the "dilemma of difference" and tried to walk a careful line between claims made on behalf of women's special needs and interests and the perils of biological determinism.

58. On the relation of Drinker's work to this branch of feminist thought, see my essay, "Women's History and Music History: The Feminist Historiography of Sophie Drinker," Journal of Women's History 5 (1993): 8-31.

59. SHD, Music and Women , 174.

60. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow , 139.

61. SHD, Memoir, 117.

62. To be fair, Drinker at no point abandons her critique of the "patriarchal culture pattern" in which it is formidably difficult for women to obtain the training they need to become composers. But it is also true that she never subjects the composers of the great tradition to the scornful dismissal otherwise reserved for men who usurp women's cultural roles. For a more detailed discussion of the cultural and historiographic assumptions of Music and Women see my "Sophie Drinker's History," in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons , ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23-43.

63. In a similar way, Drinker's strong and outspoken feminism seems not to have found its way into family life. Both of her daughters remember being sick and tired" of hearing "women, women, women" from their mother, and yet both make clear that the most conventional of gender systems prevailed in their upbringing and in expressed expectations for their future lives.

64. SHD, untitled manuscript in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College: Sophie Hutchinson Drinker papers, carton 1, addendum 84-M96, folder 29.

65. Ibid., 15. Quoted by permission.

66. Drinker always considered Cecilia's status as patron saint of music fraudulent. Rather, she said, Cecilia was a descendant and pale shadow of the great goddesses of prehistory, symbols of the wisdom and creative energy of women. See Music and Women , ch. 17, or the unpublished manuscript "Cecilia: From Muse to Saint," in the Schlesinger Library (Sophie Hutchinson Drinker Papers, carton 1, folder 24). The latter is an iconographic study linking representations of Cecilia to allegorical characters such as La Musica, and ultimately back to portrayals of the goddesses.

67. See, for example, Jeannie G. Pool, "The Legacy of Sophie Drinker," Paid My Dues: Journal of Women and Music 3 (1979): 28-29, 40-41.

68. The Drinkers evidenced many of the characteristics Lears has enumerated in No Place of Grace as associated with antimodernism; indeed, it can be argued that Sophie in young adulthood exhibited them more markedly than Harry did—a certain ennui about daily life and worries about the authenticity of the tasks it demanded, a tendency toward vaguely neurasthenic ailments, the incessant search for meaningful spiritual roots. Lears makes no provision for gendered differences in his account, but considering the starkly different forms that life and work took for men and for women during the period in question, it seems to me a possibility that might be studied with profit. On neurasthenia, see Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903 ; on Drinker's communal, anti-individualist focus, see my "Sophie Drinker's History."

69. During the years Drinker was working on Music and Women , a number of women composers were conducting active careers in the United States: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Rebecca Clarke, Florence Price, and many more. Indeed, works by Edith Braun, Katherine Danforth Fisher, Mary Howe, and Marina Wister are listed in the repertory of works performed at the Drinkers' singing parties (HSD and SHD, Accademia dei dilettanti , 10-14).

70. "I had never been a feminist nor had anyone in my family tutored me in this train of thought. I took no part in the struggle for women suffrage. In fact, I was hardly aware that it was going on. At that point, I was absorbed in child-bearing, in the management of household affairs, and in my husband's companionship. But the time came when some sleeping part of me awoke and had to be heeded" (SHD, Memoir, 198).

1. The editors wish to thank Claribel Thomson and her husband Richard (a retired insurance executive) for sharing their memories of the Drinkers by phone in several conversations in January and May 1993, for answering our questions, and for Claribel's checking this written transcript and the editorial headnote. Richard recalled: "I was Henry Drinker's baritone soloist for those parties. I had spent some time in voice study at the Philadelphia Conservatory." Claribel was for fifty-one years, beginning in 1939, the organist at First Presbyterian Church in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

Alfred Mann, noted authority on fugal theory, Handel, Mozart, and other topics, is professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and former conductor of New York's Cantata Singers and the Bethlehem Bach Choir. The notes to his contribution are his own.

2. Sophie described Henry as "the host" of these gatherings in her book Music and Women (New York: Coward-McCann, 1948), 286. But she was no doubt deeply involved as well, as is suggested by certain remarks in the preface, jointly signed, to their list of the repertoire sung on Sunday nights and of the guests at those parties ( Accademia dei dilettanti di musica, 1930-1960 [n.p., (1966?)], 1-4).

3. Editors' note: Claribel Thomson is no doubt correct in describing thus the relatives and neighbors who attended most regularly (Henry's sister Catherine Drinker Bowen was concertmaster). But it should be added that the 23-page list of those who participated on one or more occasions includes many individuals who were unusually talented and active in the larger music world (or who were students at the time but later made substantial careers). There were numerous composers, ranging from high modernism to Broadway (Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, Lee Hoiby, Mary Howe, Leo Ornstein, William Schuman, Kay Swift, Randall Thompson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Karl Weigl), instrumentalists and the occasional opera singer (Rose Bampton, Ernest Hutcheson, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Boris Koutzen, Anton Kuerti, William H. Kincaid, John Perry, Olga Samaroff, Artur Schnabel, Marcel Tabuteau, the violin virtuoso Efrem Zimbalist and his son, Efrem, Jr., the future TV star), twelve members of the Trapp Family, some notable critics and music-loving literati (Quaintance Eaton, John Erskine, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Mrs. John Peltz, Henry Pleasants, Jr.), plus choral conductors and musicologists galore, from Europe and various parts of the United States. This information is drawn from the Drinkers' Accademia dei dilettanti . Catherine Drinker Bowen provides two additional famous names: the Russian composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner and the Norwegian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson ( Family Portrait [Boston: Little, Brown, 1970], 201).

4. The reference is to Bowen, Family Portrait , 64.

5. Samuel R. Rosenbaum, Henry S. Drinker: An Amateur of Music , published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Concert Choir and Choral Foundation, Inc. (n. p., [1958]), quotation from p. 4. This speech of tribute ("prepared for the presentation to Henry S. Drinker of the 1958 Annual Tripos Award . . . for services to the cause of choral music") is also reprinted, slightly abridged, as an article in American Choral Review . 4, no. 1 (October 1961): 5-9 Appended to the earlier printing is an address that Henry Drinker gave in 1935 to a conference of music educators: "Amateurs and Music."

6. The singer's technical "warm up": scales and arpeggios on open vowels.

7. "Auf Wiedersehen bei der Fermate!": A favorite slogan among amateurs, describing their somewhat shaky ensemble, in which "lost" members find each other again at the nearest fermata (i.e., a "hold": a chord or rest designed by the composer to be freely extended).