Mabel Daniels ─ American Composer in Transition

Composer Mabel Daniels wrote fresh-sounding works that were performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles during her lifetime. Her works have only recently begun to be performed today. Assessing the rich context of American art music of the first half of the twentieth century, Mabel Daniels (1877-1971): American Composer in Transition accounts for why works by Daniels and other American women composers fell out of favour and why they should be performed more today. Most importantly, Daniels’s life and works evidence transition in women’s roles in composition, the professionalization of American women composers, and the role that Daniels played in the institutionalization of American art music. Daniels’s dual role as a patron-composer is unique and expressive of her transitional status.

Maryann McCabe (PhD in musicology, New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) investigates issues in American music and current practices in art and music education. She is especially interested in the relationship among words, music, and the visual arts. An artist and singer, she has taught a range of courses in music and the humanities at colleges and universities in New York and New Jersey, and currently teaches at the Cultural Academy for the Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn. The author was inspired, in part, to focus on Mabel Daniels because she and Daniels were born and studied in the Boston area.