ABSTRACT

Chapter 7, “Beginnings,” is centered on Mabel Daniels’s first compositions and those of her contemporaries, which appear in A Book of Radcliffe College Songs (1909), and on her early independently published songs and choral pieces. This repertoire reflects the contexts for music making at the time, the interaction between art music and vernacular music, and the diverse musical styles that were available to the American composer during the early years of the twentieth century. In her operetta numbers, Daniels appears to have parodied existing music. She did this to learn as a composer and to engage her audience by presenting music with links to what was then popular.