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Prelude and Fugue for
Flute and Piano, Op. 43
Fantasia-Sonata for
Violin and Piano, Op. 18
Dance Sonata for Solo Pano, Op. 24
Virginia Eskin, piano
Deborah Boldin, flute
Irina Muresanu, violin
I am living a full rich life and am so deeply grateful for the opportunity for having this study and life to myself. Of course, the days are not long enough to do all I want to do.
—Marion Bauer (Paris, 1923)
The fascinating career of composer, author, critic, and music professor Marion Eugenie Bauer (1882-1955) developed from her initiative and steadfast determination to forge a professional life in music. Born in Walla Walla, Washington, the youngest of seven children of Jacques Bauer, a shopkeeper, and Julie Bauer, a teacher of modern languages, Marion Bauer was not content to remain in the Pacific Northwest. After Jacques Bauer died in 1890, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where, according to Bauer, her oldest sister, Emilie Frances Bauer, “became literally the father of the family, working with my mother to give the younger brothers and sisters an education and every opportunity for cultural development. To her I owe the fact that I went into the serious study of music.” A music critic for the Portland Oregonian as well as a composer and teacher, Emilie Bauer was able to build a career as a critic, first in Boston and then in New York City. After graduating from St. Helen's Hall in Portland, Marion Bauer moved in 1898 to join her sister Emilie in New York, where she continued to study piano with her sister, and piano and harmony with Henry Holden Huss. In 1906, she sailed for Paris, where she studied piano with Raoul Pugno and harmony with Nadia Boulanger.
Bauer's birthdate has been reported as August 15, 1887 in a number of books from the 1940s through the 1990s. Susan Pickett and Christine Ammer have recently uncovered evidence in the public records of Walla Walla and Portland that Bauer misrepresented her birthyear so she would seem to be five years younger than she actually was. Perhaps Bauer wanted to appear to be the same age as her teacher Boulanger (born on September 16, 1887) and consequently recast her birthyear as 1887 rather than 1882.
Upon returning to New York in 1907, Bauer studied with Eugene Heffley and Walter Henry Rothwell, both of whom advised her to concentrate on composition. In 1910, she returned to Europe in order to study counterpoint and form with Paul Ertel for a year in Berlin. She established a reputation as a composer by 1912, the year that she signed a seven-year contract with Arthur P. Schmidt, who had by this time published works by John Knowles Paine, Amy Beach, Helen Hopekirk, and numerous other American composers. But Bauer still found her training in composition insufficient, and traveled to Paris again in May, 1923 in order to continue her studies at the age of 40 with André Gédalge, teacher of Ravel and Milhaud, at the Conservatoire. In her words, “As a member of the American Music Guild, I had the opportunity to measure my powers and my limitations with those of my colleagues…. The result was a period of study in Europe. This time I decided in Paris I would find the kind of work and musical environment for which I was seeking.”
In January, 1926, after receiving the news that Emilie was seriously ill, Bauer moved back to New York. Two months later, her sister died, and in September of that year, Bauer was hired as an instructor of music at New York University (then Washington Square College), becoming the first female faculty member in the music department. She became an assistant professor in 1928 and an associate professor in 1930, remaining at NYU until 1951; she also taught part-time at the Juilliard School beginning in 1940.
During her twenty-five year career at NYU, Bauer taught many students, including composers Milton Babbitt, Julia Frances Smith, and Miriam Gideon and conductor Maurice Peress. (In 1983 Babbitt described Bauer as “a wonderful lady…whose name I'm going to do everything in the world to immortalize.”) Her orchestral work Sun Splendor was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1947 under the direction of Leopold Stokowski, notable as the second work by a woman to be performed by the Philharmonic.
In her publications, teaching, and administrative activities, Bauer was a staunch supporter of modernism. She authored or co-authored five published books in all. Her most celebrated text, Twentieth Century Music (1933), enabled several generations of musicians and laypersons alike to study scores by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky that they would not have been able to encounter otherwise. Dedicated to her former teacher Eugene Heffley, Twentieth Century Music proposed that “…the ear is tremendously elastic in its powers of adjustment, and sounds which are at first disturbing may become so familiar, through our habit-forming propensities, that the pleasure-pain sensations are subject to a wide scale of modification. And sounds which were painful, when once accepted and organized by the brain may become pleasurable. We are children of an age of great complexities not the least of which is modern harmony, but the public soon accustoms itself, unless it is enslaved by prejudices, to new combinations of tone.” Bauer also served the cause of modern music as a board member of the American Composers Alliance, the League of Composers, and the Society for the Publication of American Music, all of which promoted twentieth-century music.
Bauer's own music is more influenced by French impressionism than by German serialism, and is more conservative than the music she advocated of the Second Viennese School. It is plausible that her publisher's preference for a more conservative style and her experience of having her Violin Sonata marked down from first to second place in the Society for the Publication of American Music's 1928 competition, expressly for its “modern tendencies,” may have led her to favor a pitch-centered style over “ultra-modern” composition. The Violin Sonata was published under the title “Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata.”
In her writings, Bauer advocated music by women including Ruth Crawford, Louise Talma, Miriam Gideon, Vivian Fine, Germaine Tailleferre, Mabel Daniels, Ulric Cole, Ethel Glenn Hier, among many others. She also recognized the necessity of a organizing the Society of American Women Composers, which she co-founded with Amy Beach and eighteen other composers. As for her own views on being a “woman composer,” she declared: “My early aspiration was not to listen to the sly remarks of intolerant men regarding women composers…if given a reasonable chance for development, an individual talent, regardless of sex, can progress and grow.”
With pianist Harrison Potter, who taught at Mount Holyoke College from 1946 to 1957 and at Miss Porter's School from 1947 to 1950, Bauer gave a series of lecture-recitals on twentieth-century music at the Chautauqua Summer Music Institute in Chautauqua, New York from the 1920s to the 1950s. During Bauer's lifetime, Potter performed her piano music at concerts organized by the League of Composers, the WPA Federal Music Project, the MacDowell Club, and Phi Beta National Fraternity of Music and Speech. Bauer died in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in August, 1955.
The acceptance of American music and music by women as legitimate topics of scholarly interest at the beginning of the new millennium has made possible the recent recovery of neglected musical figures such as Bauer. Over the past few decades, Bauer's compositions have fortunately received renewed attention from scholars and performers. Still, much research still remains to be done on Bauer: numerous compositions remain in manuscript, no biography currently exists of her, and only a handful of analytical studies of her music has been published. The collection of Marion Bauer Papers at New York University contains manuscripts of four proposed books—Titans of Music, Modern Creators of Music, Some Social Aspects of Music, and Who Was Monteverdi?—as well as several unpublished papers, all of which might provide grist for future research projects. Spanning nearly three decades of Bauer's compositional career, this disc is a crucial step towards recording Bauer's entire oeuvre. The graceful and sensitive performances here by Virginia Eskin, Deborah Boldin, and Irina Muresanu will spur further interest in an intriguing and gifted American composer whose musical reputation deserves to come to a full flowering nearly fifty years after her death.
Bauer recalled that while waiting for an oculist's appointment, she “scratched a staff on a scrap piece of paper and composed [her] first song.” Her early interest in the vocal medium may account for her remarkable ear for melody: her Prelude and Fugue for Flute and Piano, op. 43 (1948) demonstrates her ability to compose eloquent melodies supported by a varied harmonic palette. The intricacy of the fugal writing and refined interplay of the flute and piano display Bauer's mastery of the form in this work composed during the last decade of her life.
The earliest work on this disc, Bauer's Six Preludes, op. 15 (1922) gives a sense of the range of Bauer's initial writing, ranging from the quiet, meditative mood of the first prelude to the stormy passion of the sixth, all undergirded by the composer's developing ability to forge a unique compositional voice with a distinctive French-American flavor.
The simple F minor opening movement of Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 18 (1925), marked Moderato romantico, belies its later virtuosic writing for both instruments and its subsequent departure from a key signature in the second and third movements, Ben ritmico e vivace and Lento espressivo, respectively. The melodic and harmonic
language in the Fantasia suggests Bauer's years of study in France—particularly in her lilting writing for violin and use of quartal harmonies—and is reminiscent of the style and aesthetic of Lili Boulanger's Deux Morceaux for violin and piano (1914).
True to its title, Aquarelle, op. 39, no. 1 (1944) presents a delicate wash of pastels whose shadings subtly darken and shift during its brief duration. A Fancy (1927), composed nearly twenty years before Aquarelle, provides an even more fleeting glimpse of the composer's hand at muted harmonic colors.
Some of Bauer's finest writing is for piano, as Eskin brilliantly demonstrates in the Dance Sonata, op. 24 (1932). Performed at several concerts during the course of Bauer's lifetime, including a WPA Federal Music Project concert in 1936 in New York and a program devoted to her music held at New York's Town Hall in 1951, this three-movement work is Bauer at her best. The first movement, Allegro appasionata, develops its striking opening theme through a lushly impassioned harmonic landscape; the more restrained second movement, Sarabande and Variations, projects a quiet dignity and overarching sense of precise compositional control; and the evocative third movement, Scherzo—Allegretto giocoso, is alternately humorous and poignant, propelled by Bauer's vivid rhythmic imagination.
—Ellie M. Hisama,
author of Gendering Musical Modernism:
The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon
and Director, Institute for Studies
in American Music at Brooklyn College
Virginia Eskin is known for her wide-ranging and unusual repertoire. She has performed as a soloist throughout the United States, Europe and Israel, including concerto appearances with the Annapolis, Buffalo, Louisville, New Hampshire, Rochester, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Utah Symphony Orchestras; the Boston Classical, the Israel Sinfonietta, and the Boston Pops. She has also performed as a soloist with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, with the New England Ragtime Ensemble under Gunther Schuller, and at the Sedalia, Missouri Ragtime Festival.
Ms. Eskin has nearly 20 recordings to her credit on the Channel Classics, Koch, Arabesque and Albany Records labels. She holds an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Keene State College, awarded to recognize her contributions to women's music. She teaches at Northeastern University and has lectured at colleges throughout the United States. Ms. Eskin performs regularly with the Art of Music Chamber Players in Boston and appears at the Monadnock Music Festival.
Flutist Deborah Boldin is the Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston. She is an active chamber musician and has performed with such noted artists as Robert Spano, Paula Robison, Kenneth Cooper, Virginia Eskin, and the Borromeo String Quartet. She was the recipient of the First Prize at the Music Teachers National Association Competition, and the Alice & Leary Taylor Prize in Performance from the Peabody Conservatory.
She has served as principal flutist with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Chamber Orchestra, the AIMS Festival Orchestra and the American Conservatory's chamber music festival in Fontainebleau, France and has also appeared with the Boston Philharmonic and the New World Symphony. Ms. Boldin received a BM from the Peabody Conservatory and a Graduate Diploma from the New England Conservatory. Her teachers have included Mark Sparks, Patrick Gallois and Paula Robison. She can be heard on Argo Records.
Praised by the Boston Globe as “not a virtuoso, but an artist,” and by the Strad magazine for her “first-rate” debut recital at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall, violinist Irina Muresanu has won attention as an outstanding young violinist through numerous appearances as soloist, recitalist and chamber musician.
Born in Bucharest, Romania, Ms. Muresanu studied at the University of Illinois where she received a Masters degree and is now a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the New England Conservatory. She has appeared as soloist with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Metropolitan Orchestra in Montreal, the Boston Philharmonic, the Romanian National Radio Orchestra and the Transvaal Philharmonic in Pretoria, South Africa. Ms. Muresanu has been awarded top prizes in the Montreal International Competition, Queen Elizabeth Violin Competition, UNISA International String Competition, Washington International Competition, Pro Musicis International Award and Schadt String Competition, among others.
Recorded at WGBH, Boston, Massachusetts • Engineered &edited by Alan Mattes • Produced by Virginia Eskin
dedicated to P. &S. Rubottom
Prelude & Fugue for Flute & Piano, Op. 43
Six Preludes, Op. 15 for solo piano
Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 18
9 Moderato romantico [7:13]
10 Ben ritmico e vivace [5:27]
11 Lento espressivo-allegro con moto [8:48]
12 Aquarelle, Op. 39, No. 1 for solo piano [2:17]
13 A Fancy, Op. 21, No. 1 for solo piano [1:28]
Dance Sonata for Solo Piano, Op. 24
14 Moderato poco agitato [5:49]
15 Sarabande & variations [5:14]
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