ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, “Composing in a changing world,” addresses in greater detail the strategies that Mabel Daniels used to establish herself as a serious composer of art music. The height of her career intersected with a time when radio and recording technologies were creating a culture of listeners as the culture of amateur performance was declining and an American art music culture was becoming institutionalized. Daniels’s negotiations around the publication of her works, reflected in her lengthy correspondence with her main publisher Arthur P. Schmidt, document this time of change. As a composer-patron of Harvard University, Daniels becomes the voice there for women’s composition just as concert reprogramming and historicism at Harvard-Radcliffe were replacing women’s operetta.
