Mabel Daniels (1877–1971): An American Composer in Transition assesses Daniels within the context of American music of the first half of the twentieth century. Daniels wrote fresh sounding works that were performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles during her lifetime but her works have only recently begun to be performed again. The book explains why works by Daniels and other women composers fell out of favor and argues for their performance today. This study of Daniels’s life and works evinces transition in women’s roles in composition, the professionalization of 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.

Exploring a diverse, distinguished repertoire, and transcending the rhetoric of neglect, this book transforms understanding of women composers.

The first book in twenty-five years to survey the life and music of America's pioneering female composer of concert works.

This Companion explores women's work in music since 1900 across a broad range of musical genres and professions, including the classical tradition, popular music, and music technology. The crucial contribution of women to music education and the music industries features alongside their activity as composers and performers. The book considers the gendered nature of the musical profession, in areas including access to training, gendered criticism, sexualization, and notions of 'gender appropriate' roles or instruments. It covers a wide range of women musicians, such as Marin Alsop, Grace Williams, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and Adele. Each thematic section concludes with a contribution from a practitioner in her own words, reflecting upon the impact of gender on her own career. Chapters include suggestions for further reading on each of the topics covered, providing an invaluable resource for students of Feminist Musicology, Women in Music, and Music and Gender.

Daniels was a New England composer. She studied at the newly founded Radcliffe College at Harvard, and was later the first women in Ludwig Tuille's score-reading class at the Munich Conservatory. She was head of music at Simmons College, Boston, and a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony for 24 summers from 1914. She worked for women's suffrage and was endlessly generous to other musicians, giving anonymous composition prizes, and establishing a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music. She preferred writing for voices, and choral pieces are among her best known works. She also wrote stage, orchestral and instrumental music. Her musical language includes triadic harmony with occasional diatonic dissonance; the melodic lines are sometimes angular, due partly to modal shifts and unpredictable triads.

Moving from the sphere of parlor music into the world of serious art music, she was the only American woman of her time to compose several full-length operas.

After his tragic death in 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Charles T. Griffes became the object of an almost fanatical devotion among many American music-lovers, and his reputation and stature have grown steadily ever since. His songs, piano compositions, string music, and symphonic works are now in the repertoire of leading musicians and symphonic organizations. Against a rich background of contemporary figures and of musical life in the early years of this century, Mr. Maisel here traces the story of Griffes' rise from obscure origins. Much light is thrown on the conditons and problems of American music in general; and there is a careful analysis of many of the central ideas of Griffes' music, especially his best-known pieces, The White Peacock and The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. The result is an interesting chapter in the history of American culture, and a fascinating study of the creative temperament in our time.