ABSTRACT
Chapter 10, “Daniels’s place in American composition,” explores Mabel Daniels’s life and works both in relation to her woman composer contemporaries and to woman composers active post 1950. The chapter also discusses Daniels’s life and works within the context of modernity, arguing that she neither stopped composing nor became static stylistically. Daniels used new developments, including unresolved dissonance, quartal harmony, and changing scales and modes within a single work, steadily, but with caution. She also used traditional triadic harmony with an awareness of its historical meaning, but with great ingenuity. Daniels internalized the styles of successful composers, who were mostly all male, which was an important survival strategy for women composers at the time. In so doing, Daniels neither succumbed to her insecurities nor shut down as a composer.
