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.Edwards, J. Michele, "Bauer, Marion Eugénie," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ed. Stanley Sadie. London: MacMillan, 1980. II: 924. In the liner notes to Music of Marion Bauer, Ellie Hisama discusses the recent discovery made by Susan Pickett and Christine Ammer that evidence in the public records of Walla Walla, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, indicates that Bauer may have intentionally misrepresented her birth year by a difference of five years, saying she was born in 1887 rather than 1882. Ammer and Pickett assert that in presenting her birth year as later than it actually was, Bauer wanted to appear the same age as her teacher Nadia Boulanger (b. September 16, 1887) rather than older. 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.Ellie Hisama, liner notes to Music of Marion Bauer, Virginia Eskin, Deborah Boldin, and Irina Muresanu, Albany Records TR465, 2001, compact disc. 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.Susan Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism" in The Maud Powell Signature, Women in Music: The March of the Women 2, no. 2 (June 2008): 34, accessed March 22, 2011.
Later in Bauer's childhood, Jacques Bauer, an amateur musician himself, recognized his youngest daughter's musical aptitude,Nicholas E. Tawa, Mainstream Music of Early Twentieth Century America: The Composers, Their Times, and Their Works (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 155. and Bauer began studying piano with Emilie.Ellie Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4. When Jacques Bauer died in 1890, the Bauers moved to Portland, Oregon, where Bauer graduated from St. Helen's Hall in 1898.Hisama, liner notes to Music of Marion Bauer. Upon completion of secondary school, Bauer joined her sister Emilie in New York City in order to begin focusing on a career in composition.
Studies Once in New York, Bauer commenced studies with Henry Holden Huss and Eugene Heffley, in addition to her sister Emilie.Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 4. 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.Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 34-35. 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.Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 35. 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. (Ultimately, Boulanger would teach such notable figures as Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Roy Harris and Gail Kubik.) As she had done with Pugno, in exchange for composition lessons from Boulanger, Bauer taught her English.
When she returned to New York in 1907, Bauer continued her studies with Heffley and Walter Henry Rothwell,Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 5. additionally teaching piano and music theory on her own.Christine Ammer, Unsung: A History of Women in American Music, Century ed. (Portland: Amadeus Press, 2001), 146. 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; it was after this period of study in 1912 that she signed a seven-year contract with [music publisher] Arthur P. Schmidt.
Although active as a composer and private instructor in the years following 1912, Bauer ultimately undertook two more periods of study in Europe, partially facilitated by financial inheritances upon the deaths her mother and older brother.Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 37. 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. Almost ten years later, Bauer decided once again to undertake an extended period of study in Europe, this time at the Paris Conservatory with André Gedalge, who had also taught composers such as Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger. At the time, she was 40 years old and offered the following reason for continuing her studies comparatively late in life: "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." Bauer's studies at the Paris Conservatory, however, were cut short in 1926 when she received the news that her sister Emilie had been hit by a car.Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 40. Bauer returned to New York, but Emilie's injuries ultimately proved fatal.
Career Although Bauer had never earned a college degree (despite her years of study), in September 1926 she was hired as an instructor for New York University's music department, becoming their first female music faculty member. Among her early colleagues were Albert Stoessel, Gustave Reese, and Percy Grainger. During her tenure at NYU from 1926 to 1951, Bauer taught classes in composition, form and analysis, aesthetics and criticism, and music history and appreciation, earning the rank of associate professor in 1930. Bauer taught using her own book, the readings from which would then be followed by class discussions. She also advocated strongly for new music and would play "the few pertinent records and piano rolls available," or have students play unavailable works.Milton Babbitt, "Introduction to Marion Bauer's Twentieth Century Music (1978)" in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, eds. Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 368-69. Some of her most famous students from her years at NYU included Milton Babbitt, Julia Frances Smith, Miriam Gideon, and conductor Maurice Peress.
In addition to teaching at NYU, Bauer lectured at Juilliard and Columbia University. She also lectured annually at the Chautauqua Summer Music Institute in Chautauqua, New York, putting on lecture-recitals of twentieth-century music with pianist Harrison Potter throughout her career. Potter performed Bauer's piano music in other settings as well, including concerts put on by the League of Composers, the WPA Federal Music Project, the MacDowell Club, and Phi Beta National Fraternity of Music and Speech. During the Great Depression years, Bauer also spent summers teaching at Mills College, the Carnegie Institute, and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music as well as Juilliard.Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 42.
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.Edwards, New Grove, 924. Bauer also helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composers Alliance, serving on the board of the latter. In 1937, Aaron Copland founded the League of Composers, and asked Bauer to serve on the executive board of that organization as well.Diana Ambache, liner notes to Marion Bauer: American Youth Concerto, performed by the Ambache Chamber Orchestra and Ensemble, Naxos 8.559253, 2005, compact disc. 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.Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 123.
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.Edwards, New Grove, 924. 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.Ammer, 148. Prior to her death in 1926, Emilie Bauer had held the post at the Musical Leader. (Pickett, "From the Wild West to New York Modernism," 40). 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.Susan Pickett, "Chapter 15: Marion in Paris, 1923-1926," The Bauer Sisters, unpublished, used with special permission of the author. 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. Bauer's book also discussed modernist works by African American composers and included jazz in its discussion of twentieth-century music.Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 124.
During her Tenure at New York University, Bauer worked on many manuscripts, now archived at the institution.