Marion Eugénie Bauer (15 August 1882 – 9 August 1955) was an American composer, teacher, writer, and music critic. She played an active role in shaping American musical identity in the early half of the twentieth century.
As a composer, Bauer wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphonic orchestra, solo voice, and vocal ensembles. She gained prominence as a teacher, serving on the faculty of Washington Square College of New York University, where she taught music history and composition from 1926 to 1951. In addition to her position at NYU, Bauer was affiliated with the Juilliard School as a guest lecturer from 1940 until her death in 1955. Bauer also wrote extensively about music: she was the editor for the Chicago-based Musical Leader and authored and co-authored several books including her 1933 text Twentieth Century Music.
Throughout her life, Bauer promoted not only her own work but new music in general. Bauer helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composers Alliance, serving as a board member of the latter. Bauer also held leadership roles in both the League of Composers and the Society for the Publication of American Music as a board member and secretary, respectively. With Claire Raphael Reis, Minna Lederman, and others, she was regularly in a leadership position in these organizations.
Bauer's music includes dissonance and extended tertian, quartal, and quintal harmonies, though it rarely goes outside the bounds of extended tonality, save for her brief experimentation with serialism in the 1940s. During her lifetime, she enjoyed many performances of her works, most notably the New York Philharmonic premiere of Sun Splendor in 1947 under the baton of Leopold Stokowski and a 1951 New York Town Hall concert devoted solely to her music.
Biography
Early life
Marion Bauer was born in Walla Walla, Washington, on August 15, 1882. Her parents—both of French-Jewish background—had immigrated to the United States, where her father Jacques Bauer worked as a shopkeeper and her mother Julie Bauer worked as a teacher of modern languages. Bauer was the youngest of seven children, with an age difference of 17 years between herself and her oldest sister, noted music critic, composer, and educator, Emilie Frances Bauer.
Later in Bauer's childhood, Jacques Bauer, an amateur musician himself, recognized his youngest daughter's musical aptitude, and Bauer began studying piano with Emilie. When Jacques Bauer died in 1890, the Bauers moved to Portland, Oregon, where Bauer graduated from St. Helen's Hall in 1898. Upon completion of secondary school, Bauer joined her sister Emilie in New York City in order to begin focusing on a career in composition. In 1905, her studies brought her into contact with French violinist and pianist Raoul Pugno, who was using New York as a base on an extended concert tour of the United States. By virtue of her upbringing in a home headed by French immigrants, Bauer was fluent in both French and English, and was thus able to teach Pugno and his family English. As a result of this favor, Pugno invited Bauer to study with him in Paris in 1906, and it was during this time that Bauer also became the first American to study with Nadia Boulanger, an associate of Pugno's in the Paris music scene. additionally teaching piano and music theory on her own. After another year of study in Europe from 1910 to 1911, this time focusing on form and counterpoint with Paul Ertel in Berlin, Bauer began to establish herself as a serious composer; In 1914, she once again returned to Berlin to study with Ertel, but her time there was curtailed by the outbreak of World War I. Bauer returned to New York, but Emilie's injuries ultimately proved fatal. Some of her most famous students from her years at NYU included Milton Babbitt, Julia Frances Smith, Miriam Gideon, and conductor Maurice Peress.
left|thumb|Composer Marion Bauer between 1902 and 1930, unknown photographer
Even with her teaching and lecturing responsibilities, Bauer remained active as a composer. Between 1919 and 1944, she spent a total of twelve summers in residence at the MacDowell Colony, where she met composers such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Amy Beach and focused on composition. Bauer also helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composers Alliance, serving on the board of the latter. Bauer additionally served as secretary for the Society for the Publication of American Music, and helped co-found the Society of American Women Composers in 1925 along with Amy Beach and eighteen others.
As a writer and music critic, Bauer was respected for "her intellectual approach to new music," yet she also maintained a level of accessibility in her writings. For instance, she was published in various journals, was editor of the highly regarded Chicago-based Musical Leader, and most famously published her book Twentieth Century Music, all of which garnered her respect in the music world. At the same time, though, Bauer made new music accessible to newcomers with her books such as How Music Grew: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day. Bauer also had a highly inclusive view of what constituted "serious" music, as demonstrated in the content of Twentieth Century Music. Besides being one of the first textbooks to discuss serialism, Twentieth Century Music also mentioned numerous women composers in contrast to other contemporary music textbooks such as Paul Rosenfeld's Musical Portraits, An Hour with American Music and John Tasker Howard's Our Contemporary Composers, which only briefly mentioned women composers, if they were mentioned at all.
During her Tenure at New York University, Bauer worked on many manuscripts, now archived at the institution.
Such works include, “notes for a proposed book on “Titans of Music” with chapters on Monteverdi (ch. I), Beethoven (ch. IV), and Brahms and the Schumanns (ch. VI); a book on "Modern Creators of Music: A Survey of Contemporary Music and Its Makers" with chapters on Berlioz (ch. II) and Liszt and Wagner (ch. III); and a book on "Some Social Aspects of Music: Its Purpose and Place" with chapters on “The Functions of Music” (pt. I, ch. I), “Music as a Common Language” (pt. I, ch. II), “Music in Therapy and Industry” (pt. I, ch. III) and “Music’s Place in Religion” (pt. I, ch. IV) (Shewbert, 2008). Articles, speeches, and “Contemporary Piano Music: Grade II and III” and “American Piano Music” are also found in these archives.
although she continued to lecture at Juilliard. The same year, Bauer gave her last lecture at Chautauqua, a social and educational convention held in Chautauqua, New York. Featuring many writers, musicians, teachers, and other influential figures, Bauer delivered a speech on “The Meaning of Music.”
WNYC, a New York media company, presented a program of Bauer’s compositions in 1954, with support from the American Composers’ Alliance. This program, performed by pianist Dorothy Eustis, included Bauer's works, “Sun Splendor,” “Dance Sonata,” “Here Alone,” “Dreams in the Dusk,” and “From the Shore.” Vocal pieces were sung by tenor Carey Sparks.
Following the loss of her sister, Bauer stepped down as the New York Editor of the periodical, The Musical Leader, only a few months later. She also experimented with spoken words set to music. Her music is generally melodically driven, using "extended tonality [and] emphasizing colouristic harmony and diatonic dissonance." The influence of the latter is particularly evident in comparing Bauer's 1917 work Three Impressions for piano to Griffes's Roman Sketches published a year earlier: each is an impressionistic-style suite with a poem preceding each movement.
The discrepancy between the relative conservatism of Bauer's work versus the more experimental works she advocated in her writings such as Twentieth Century Music is partially explained by her publisher Arthur P. Schmidt's hesitation to support her early modernist inclinations in composition. It is inferred that when Bauer's seven-year contract was about to expire, Schmidt requested that Bauer simplify her compositional style, as indicated by Bauer's response to his correspondence: "It is not stubbornness on my part not to write simple things. I can only write what I feel–and someday (soon I hope) I shall learn to do the big simple thing. I must do my work in steps–evolutionary, not revolutionary. I have so little time to write that naturally change of style is slow." It is also possible that the experience of having her Violin Sonata (later published under the title Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata) demoted from first to second place in the 1928 Society for the Publication of American Music competition expressly for its "modernist tendencies" led Bauer to adopt a comparatively conservative style of composition. The development of this harmonic technique in turn influenced the music of Aaron Copland.
Notable collaborations and performances
During her lifetime, Bauer's music was well received by performers, critics, and the public alike. Virtuoso violinist Maud Powell commissioned "Up the Ocklawaha" in 1912, an impressionistic work for violin and piano that programmatically reflected Powell's own excursion on the Ocklawaha River in north central Florida. Notably, Bauer was the second woman to have her work performed by the New York Philharmonic: Leopold Stokowski conducted the premiere of her Sun Splendor at Carnegie Hall in 1947.
This feature was also described as “one of the great events of her professional career” by author Madeleine Goss, who mentioned it in her book, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers, in 1952 (Goss, Modern Music-Makers, 136).
Personal life
Personality
By the recollections of friends, colleagues, and students, Bauer was a kindhearted, good-humored person, who treated others with warmth, compassion, and generosity. He too describes Bauer as generous and sensitive, particularly in terms of guiding her students' careers, but also in terms of her writing due to the fact that she mentions so many composers and organizations. Frederick Stoessel, a friend and former student of Bauer, “wrote of her humanity, her ‘gentility, her kindness, and her sensitivity,’” twenty-one years after her death. Although Bauer's memorial service was conducted by a rabbi, she was cremated thereafter, Both Maurice Peress, a former student, and Frederic Stoessel said that Bauer practiced Christian Science, a claim further supported by a letter Bauer wrote in 1923 expressing "a desire to publish a song appropriate for a Christian Science service."
Sexual orientation
Bauer never married, and much of her personal life remains a mystery. She lived with and was supported by her sister Emilie until Emilie's death in 1926.
Although unconfirmed, Ruth Crawford Seeger's writings, when considered along with remarks by Martin Bernstein (a longtime friend of Bauer's and a former chair of NYU music dept.) and Milton Babbitt, imply that Bauer may have been a lesbian. Crawford and Bauer met at the MacDowell Colony in 1929, where Bauer quickly became a mentor and close friend to the much younger Crawford. Although Crawford preferred to characterize their relationship as one of "sisterly-motherly love," she also acknowledged that, at one time, their relationship had bordered on becoming sexual, particularly on Bauer's part when she reserved a single hotel room for the two of them at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Liège in September 1930, which made Crawford "uncomfortable." Along with Crawford's perceptions of her relationship with Bauer, Martin Bernstein stated: "[A]s a female, [Bauer] had very little interest in men [emphasis in original]...At least if she had any romantic liaisons with men, we don't know about it." Babbitt further substantiated Bernstein's thoughts during an interview about Bauer when he remarked, "And she was very much a...let's simply say unmarried. But she was an absolute dear." Conclusive evidence as to Bauer's sexual orientation has not yet been established. but also by the impact she had on the careers of both Ruth Crawford Seeger and Milton Babbitt, who went on to become well-known American composers of the twentieth century. After they met at the MacDowell Colony in 1929, Bauer encouraged Crawford's efforts in composition and "contributed greatly to Crawford's musical growth and her professional visibility." For Crawford, Bauer represented a powerful connection to the musical establishment. With her position at the Musical Leader, Bauer was able to publish "a glowing review of a private concert of Crawford's music"; additionally, Bauer introduced Crawford to Gustave Reese, an editor at the G. Schirmer publishing company at the time. Babbitt specifically mentions his appreciation for her discussion of the serialist composers with accompanying musical examples; during the Depression years, scores (especially of new music) were prohibitively expensive to own personally, and only a few libraries had copies. Babbitt greatly respected Bauer, saying in 1983 that Bauer was "a wonderful lady...whose name I'm going to do everything in the world to immortalize."