Q: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?

White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.

Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.

A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work.

Q: How useful is the “New Queer Cinema” label to describe Haynes’s work?

White: Haynes’s place in gay cinema is somewhat paradoxical and this goes for the narrower question of his affiliation to New Queer Cinema too. The difficulty is that Haynes doesn’t dwell on gay subject matter in the obviously direct (and oppositional) fashion of New Queer Cinema films like Greg Araki’s The Living End, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, or Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Haynes’s gay stories and characters are more ambivalent or tangential. For example, the men who have sex with men in the “Homo” storyline (adapted from Jean Genet) of Poison couldn’t be called role models. Then there’s tormented Frank (Dennis Quaid) in 1950s Far from Heaven, who meets a young man by the pool while on holiday and later admits desperately to his wife before he leaves her that only now does he comprehend what love is. Self-hatred and inhibition are burdens it’s hard to imagine ever lifting from him.

The problem is only resolved if “queer” is understood to be something that encompasses but goes beyond homosexuality itself. In a Film Quarterly interview published in 1993, a year after critic B. Ruby Rich baptized the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes said: “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. . . . I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?” Queer is perhaps most usefully thought about in relation to Haynes’s films not as a sexual orientation but as a general name for refusing social and artistic norms. (After all, gay people can be just as
conservative as straight.) Once the idea is broadened like this, the heroically rebellious queers in Haynes’s films include not only the centrally important character of Richie in Poison’s “Hero” story, a boy who kills his father and abandons his mother, but also Carol in Safe and even, perhaps, for a little while, Mildred (Kate Winslet) in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.  

Q: Unlike many “serious” filmmakers, Haynes does not shy from melodrama. Why does he embrace this cinematic tradition?

White: Haynes’s relation to melodrama really needs a whole book to itself. Haynes inherits both from directors like Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls—emigrés who mastered the Hollywood domestic melodrama after World War II—and from the validation of their work in the 1970s by radical film critics and by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder as stinging critiques of the American mainstream rather than apolitical lightweight entertainment. (This question of the politics of melodrama continues to be debated, particularly in regard to Sirk: some insist that there’s no true subversive force in his films, though I certainly disagree.) Fassbinder updated Sirk in films like The Merchant of Four Seasons and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by making the attack on normality more explicit: the depiction of social cruelty and regimentation isn’t ambiguous in Fassbinder’s melodramas, as it mostly is in a Sirk film such as All That Heaven Allows. Haynes knowingly revives a lot of the Sirkian ironic varnish, but in full consciousness of and
affinity with Fassbinder’s less guarded reinvention.

Perhaps the crucial thing is that cinematic melodrama allows its exponents to play on
two boards: sympathetically exploiting the dramatic pathos of family strife at the same time as exposing the dark side of small-town conformism. Perhaps what appeals to such intelligent directors about melodrama is precisely that it can work in different and even conflicting ways at the same time. You can consider Far from Heaven, Haynes’s most direct homage to Sirk and Ophuls and Fassbinder, to be mainly a playful postmodern pastiche full of knowing allusions; you can be moved to tears by the characters’ struggles; or, as I do, you can regard the film as Haynes’s most hopeless and disturbing account of social entrapment. Maybe you can even do all three, and no doubt there are other alternatives too.

Q: You interviewed Haynes at length for the book: what struck you most about his responses?

White: There were three interviews, which were eventually edited together. The first two
occurred when the writing was underway, the last when it was nearly finished. Talking to the subject of a book of criticism is of course both rewarding and potentially inhibiting because of a certain “anxiety of influence.” Even by the high standards of many directors, Haynes is precise and persuasive about the intended meanings of his films—his DVD commentary tracks are particularly interesting and absorbing. (There wasn’t a commentary available on Velvet Goldmine for a long time, but fortunately for my research the 2011 Blu-ray edition put this absence right.) We discussed each of Haynes’s films, including his high-school effort (which unfortunately wasn’t available to view), The Suicide, and his graduation film, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (which I did see and so could identify its traces in the subsequent Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There). As it happened, by the way, Haynes’s comments about Safe ended up being the most directly influential on my interpretation.

I decided after the first interview not to quote from these new discussions in my analyses. There were a couple of reasons for this decision. The first is that the commentary tracks have a particular immediacy—Haynes is there actually watching the film while commenting—that gave plenty of detail to engage with. The second is that to partition analysis and interview in this way offers the reader the opportunity to consider Haynes’s statements without my explicit commentary on them. The separation obviously isn’t complete, the interviews permeate the analyses, but I hope this decision makes the reader’s experience more interesting. In any case, at the heart of my sense of Haynes’s work are representations in his films of mysterious solitude and psychic remove—but I
think it’s fair to add that the author himself doesn’t stress these depictions to the same degree.

What was very interesting to me about the interviews was Haynes’s undiminished
commitment to a radical critique of society—for example, when he affirms the continuing inspiration of Jean Genet or says: “The society is telling you that if you do these things you’re gonna be fine, and everything’s good, and you’ll be accepted, but you never really believe it, and we’re haunted by that.” But such remarks aren’t surprising, finally. Of all his films, I’m Not There probably has the bluntest political edge and for a while it could have seemed like Haynes was mellowing. But then, in many ways unexpectedly, along came the really tremendous Mildred Pierce, which is as edgy and haunted as anything Haynes has made (and in many ways the best synthesis yet of the different strands of his work). It’s just a masterpiece and I absolutely relished the opportunity to write about it early on in its life.

*****

Photo courtesy of Rob White.

The claim has caused quite a dustup amongst flight historians.  Some crucial evidence supporting the Wright brothers’ title may pivot with aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, the subject of University of Illinois Press author Simine Short’s book, Locomotive to Aeromotive.

Smithsonian Magazine notes that as far back as 1901, Chanute had already found doubts about Whitehead’s claims of operating the first airplane.

No matter who made the first airborne trip, it was a new breed of innovative engineers and advocates such as Chanute who pushed those early experiments towards the beginning of an industry that would “take flight.”

Phillips was the first woman to hold a principal chair in any major American orchestra when she was chosen by conductor Leopold Stokowski for a spot in the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930.

Read the book excerpt here: SymphonyNow – A Harpist in the Lion’s Den.

Photo: Edna Phillips.  Photographer unknown. From the family collection.

The display is open 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. weekdays, at the University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak St. in Champaign.  There will be a special reception with light refreshments on Friday, April 5, from 3:00-5:00 p.m.   All viewings, and the reception, are free and open to the public.

Featured in this year’s show are two covers designed for University of Illinois Press books: Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (author Greg Goodale) and From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (author Miles White).

A high quality catalog shows each entry in full color with typographic, paper, printing, and binding information, along with designers’ and judges’ comments.  A limited number of catalog copies will be available for free.

The interview ran on the March 9, 2013, broadcast of Only a Game.

Q: What is the Wheeler-Lea Amendment that was passed in 1938?

Stole: The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 had given the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) jurisdiction over advertising, but only in cases where one business used advertising to gain an unfair advantage over another.  This meant that the FTC lacked the authority to intervene on consumers’ behalf when they were wronged, even harmed, by false and misleading advertising.  Thus there was considerable momentum for stricter advertising regulation by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933.  In June of that year, a bill to amend the 1906 Food and Drugs Act was introduced in Congress.  The measure called for new labeling laws and mandatory grading of goods to help guide consumers in the marketplace.  It also sought to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prohibit false advertising of food, drugs, or cosmetics.

Major manufacturers generally had no objection to a ban on false advertising, but their reaction to the proposed ban on the use of “ambiguity and inference” caused strong and adverse reactions.  It was exactly the use of clever advertising to create enough ambiguity for consumers to infer the desirability of one product over another, even if none existed, that drove most of the consumer industry, and thus much of capitalism in general.

This set the stage for a five-year legislative battle, with congressional hearings on several revised versions of the bill.  Helping the advertising industry’s cause was a set of well-developed public relations and lobbying strategies combines with considerable influence
over the commercial mass media. Few among the general public were fully informed about the issues at stake.  With each new version of the bill, industry concerns took the front seat, and the issue of consumer protection, which been the original impetus for the measure, gradually faded from the agenda.  Despite demands from consumer groups, New Dealers, and government regulatory agencies, advertisers survived the battle with surprising ease.  The Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act was passed in 1938, but it only minimally affected existing advertising practices.  Although false advertising was banned, the bill did not outlaw the use of “ambiguity and inference” and the call for commodity grading never materialized into law.  Today, 75 years later, The Wheeler-Lea Amendment is still the reigning law on advertising in the US.

Q: Did it have the intended effect on the advertising industry?

Stole: Although the FTC managed to crack down on the advertising practices of some big national advertisers and slap them with rather mild fines, the mass media, with their
close financial ties to these manufacturers, did not publicize the cease-and-desist orders. Because of this, the lengthy appeals procedure might be well underway before the public ever learned, for example, that the FTC had found several advertising claims by Listerine antiseptic to be unsubstantiated or that it had ordered a stop to Helena Rubenstein’s claims that its “Eye Lash Grower Cream” would cause the lashes to grow and that one of its face powders would prevent skin blemishes.  The immediate and somewhat ironic result of the law on advertising copy was a tendency to glamorize products and employ indirect assertion.  Because it was relatively easy to check the truthfulness of verbal claims, advertisements relied more heavily on illustrations to get around the law.  A pictorial illustration could pass whereas a verbal presentation might not.  This practice revealed the shortcomings of the new law as well as its general failure to encourage advertisers to provide consumers with more factual information.

Q: How did the advertising industry come to support the U.S. war effort during the 1940s?

Stole: After having secured The Wheeler Lea Amendment as legislative victory, the advertising industry faced a set of new and severe challenges.  During the Great Depression, the advertising industry and its business allies, with strong support from the advertising-based news media, had stressed the importance of advertising as a tool for creating consumer demand and eventually getting the economy back on track.  By early 1940, with an impending war on the horizon, the argument was unraveling.  Raw materials for domestic consumer goods had quickly become in short supply, causing the government to impose rationing and price control.  Thus, for advertisers to promote products that were scarce or unavailable might have an inflationary effect and possibly cause black markets. Although desperate to keep their brand names before the public, the advertising industry  worried that product advertising might be viewed as problematic, if not downright unpatriotic, by the American public.

The government’s need for increasing revenues added to the industry’s concern.  Ever since the First World War, businesses had been allowed to claim their advertising as a tax deductible expense.  By all accounts this had the effect of dramatically increasing the amount of advertising that businesses did.  Now, however, considering the limited need  for advertising, advertisers faced the possibility of having this tax-deductible privilege revoked.  Moreover, in a period in which the government was begging, borrowing and taxing at unprecedented levels to support the war effort, the notion that businesses could deduct advertising expenses from their taxable income when advertising served no purpose was problematic.  In November 1941, a few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, key members of the advertising industry met to discuss their dire situation. The meeting produced the outline of an industry-wide public relations program to protect  advertising.  The crucial idea was for the industry’s leading trade associations to establish a new group to advance the industry’s PR agenda.  Then, within weeks, America was embroiled in an all-out war.  Soon thereafter, and to the advertising industry’s surprise, the government’s newly created Office for War Information (OWI) approached the industry, asking for help in mobilizing popular support for its home front campaigns.

By early 1942, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) officially formed the Advertising Council Inc., which was renamed the War Advertising Council (WAC) between 1943 and 1945 and  positioned as a private adjunct to the government’s war information efforts, in part to protect the advertising industry from regulations.  Because the OWI had too small a  budget for the task at hand, it wanted the Advertising Council to serve as a de facto part of the OWI.

Q: Were the advertising efforts successful?

Stole: When war ended in 1945, the advertising industry believed it had done its patriotic duty and was not afraid to say so.  During the 1,307 days of war, it had encouraged the  American public to purchase more than 800 million war bonds and to plant 50 million victory gardens, as well as raising several million dollars for the Red Cross and the National War Fund Drives.  It had also fought inflation, recruited military personnel, spread information about a wide variety of salvage campaigns, and enlisted workers for industrial war-plants.  All in all, the (War) Adver­tising Council had been involved in more than 150 different home-front campaigns and, by its own estimate, had contributed more than $1 billion in time, space, and talent toward the war effort.

While the advertising industry proudly reminded the public of these contributions to the war effort, it was less likely to publicly discuss the PR rewards it had reaped from its war related activities.

Q: What were the long term postwar effects of the advertiser/politician relationship?

Stole: Largely as a result of the Advertising Council’s relentless work, the advertising industry enjoyed improved relations with the public as the war faded from view.  Moreover, and just as importantly; the intimate working relationship between industry, and government leaders continued into the postwar era, growing ever more congenial.  The Council continued its cooperation with the US government into the postwar era, working on campaigns to defend “American values” and capitalism at home and abroad, blurring the lines between industry goals and government concerns.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Stole: Writing this book made me (increasingly) aware of the advertising industry’s political and economic impact.  To the extent that advertising is discussed in our contemporary society, it is a conversation that tends to focus on advertising’s symbolic nature; how certain advertising images help shape people’s views of themselves, other and society in general.  While interesting and important questions, they fail to address the issue of why we have the kind of advertising we do or why advertising, which after all is a regulated industry, has assumed such a central role in our political economy.  My work on Advertising At War has confirmed the importance of historical research to fill some of the gaps.

L. Andrew Cooper

Q: How does Dario Argento’s work fit into the genre of “giallo?”

Cooper: The “giallo” is an Italian crime thriller set apart by violent, extravagant set pieces. “Giallo” means yellow, and the term refers to the yellow covers traditionally associated with the crime novels (often Italian translations of English-language originals) that inspired many of the films.  Argento’s directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) took the giallo to new levels of intricate mayhem, and his fifth feature, Deep Red (1975), experimented with nightmarish visuals that helped make it one of the genre’s most successful films.  Giallo conventions appear in almost all of Argento’s films, but Suspiria (1977) and other supernaturally-themed films stray too far from the giallo’s core of crime and mystery to qualify. His purest later gialli are probably Tenebre (1982), which features one of Argento’s easiest-to-follow (yet still awfully baroque) storylines, and Sleepless (2001), a late return-to-form that has helped to keep the giallo alive in the twenty-first century.

Q: Argento is thought of mostly for his horror films.  Is his work in other genres overlooked?

Cooper: Argento has often said that he can accomplish everything he wants to do with character and imagery in horror films and gialli.  His one feature outside these genres, The Five Days of Milan (1973), is worth seeing because it carries the director’s visual and narrative eccentricities into new territory, but it is a minor work.  In Argento’s films, genre provides a platform for stylistic experimentation unbounded by the norms of realism and rationality.  Horror is a starting point for thinking and feeling in Argento’s films: looking at where each film goes from that point, rather than focusing on genre as a limitation, might be the best way to approach Argento’s work.

Q: Early in his career Argento was called “the Italian Hitchcock.”  Was that a valid comparison?

Cooper: Yes and no.  The giallo, like its American cousin the slasher, builds explicitly on Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  Because Argento gave the giallo visual intensity akin to what Hitchcock typically brought to his subjects, Argento was branded as “the Italian Hitchcock” almost immediately after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  As I argue in my book, Bird is already in dialogue with Psycho and the traditions it inaugurated; the label “the Italian Hitchcock” helped to extend this dialogue throughout Argento’s career, culminating in Argento’s film Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005).  Despite the obvious importance of Hitchcock in Argento’s work, however, the comparison is somewhat superficial.  Popular perceptions of Hitchcock frame him as a master storyteller with acute psychological insight.  By contrast, Argento’s films privilege neither story nor psychology, preferring disorienting, abstract imagery and narratives that defy human agency and logical sense.

Q: Who are some filmmakers which Argento has influenced over his long career?

Cooper: Filmmakers around the world acknowledge Argento as an important influence. George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), John Carpenter (Halloween, 1978), James Wan (Saw, 2004), Pascal Laugier (Martyrs, 2008), Mick Garris (Masters of Horror, TV, 2005 – 2007), Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Quentin
Tarantino (Death Proof, 2007) are only a few of the filmmakers who have  explicitly acknowledged Argento’s contributions to their stylistic development.

Q: Many of Argento’s films are both violent and visually striking.  His critics have claimed his  excessive visuals are at the expense of narrative.  Is this a valid criticism?

Cooper: The many critics who condemn Argento’s films for bad storytelling and bad acting miss one of Argento’s most important contributions to the history of cinema: over several decades, his work has developed a sustained critique of narrative and psychological conventions.  My book explores this critique in detail, so here I’ll limit myself to saying that Argento gives horror/grindhouse audiences what Michelangelo Antonioni started giving arthouse audiences in the 1960s.  Like Antonioni’s, Argento’s films explore untenable searches for truth amidst the fragmentation of (post)modern
existence.  The two filmmakers’ generic and visual vocabularies differ radically, and they don’t always point toward the same conclusions, but their attacks on traditionally accessible narrative follow similar courses.

Q: How does Argento handle sexuality and gender issues in his films?

Cooper: Controversially.  I believe that the man himself has views of sexuality and gender that most people would call progressive, but the man’s views are less important than the difficult depictions of sexuality and gender in his works.  He most often comes under attack for the films’ graphic violence against women, whose bodies are objectified and torn apart in film after film.  As a result, some critics dismiss his films as misogynistic.  Such  dismissals rarely take into account the self-conscious strategies that the films use to call attention to the cultural processes that dehumanize women and men alike.  Some critics also see the frequent appearance of queer characters as symptoms of homophobia, but they also fail to account for ways in which the strikingly frequent appearance of queerness undermines sexual prejudice.  In Argento’s films, aestheticized violence turns toward ethical ends, and those ends include exposing misogyny and homophobia as shallow and ignorant structures of feeling.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Cooper: Argento is one of the most written-about directors in popular cinema, but very little of that writing is academic.  Academics are often blinded to his work’s cultural significance because they can’t see past (or see with and through) the lowbrow status of the horror genre or the disturbing violence of the horrific imagery.  What surprised me most is how consistently and pervasively Argento’s films speak to academic critics’ concerns.  I find a lot of “auteur” criticism uninteresting because it indulges in myths of solitary artistic genius and fallacies of intention, but even as Argento’s films raise questions about the possibility of individual agency and the desirability of coherent narrative, the corpus as a whole is individually distinct and offers a remarkably coherent vision.  I don’t really care whether this vision was born from Argento’s conscious intent, but I see the vision clearly across his works, and the longer I look at this vision, the more profound it seems.

Life of Pi

Shilpa Davé, author of the forthcoming University of Illinois Press book Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, writes about the “South Asian Invasion” of this year’s Academy Awards.

In an article for the South Asian American Digital Archive blog, Davé writes that Life of Pi wasn’t the only film recognized by the Academy in which Indian accents were thriving.

(Photo: Loren Javier, Flickr Creative Commons)

“Chicago Tonight” also posted a gallery of some of the postcard art featured in Picturing Illinois.

Mary Sue Welsh

Q: Who was Edna Phillips?  

Welsh: By joining the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930 as its principal harpist, Edna Phillips became not only that orchestra’s first female member, but also the first woman to hold a principal position in any major symphony orchestra in America.

Q: Was her addition to the orchestra controversial?         

Welsh: In 1930 it was almost unheard of for a “regular” (meaning all-male) orchestra to hire a woman, even at the local or regional level. For an orchestra as prestigious as the Philadelphia to hire one and put her in a principal position was definitely controversial. It had never been done at that level.

During the first half of the twentieth century a majority of male musicians and their audiences believed that women were incapable of holding their own in professional orchestras because they lacked the stamina, power, and reliability to do so. That (plus the strong likelihood that male musicians didn’t want their jobs jeopardized by competition from women) meant that most female instrumentalists in the 1920s and ‘30s never had the opportunity to play in a professional orchestra. The only way they could do so was to join one of the all-female professional orchestras that had come into existence at that time.

Q: Did she experience sexism from within the orchestra?

Welsh: When Phillips first arrived at the orchestra, she experienced hostility from some of the men who made it obvious that they regarded her as an unworthy intruder and who resented her taking the place of a well-liked male colleague who had been with the orchestra for seventeen years. Even Stokowski, who had hired her, poked fun at her as “a foolish virgin” during one rehearsal, but his attempted joke didn’t work. She subtly called his bluff by maintaining her composure instead of reacting with dismay and embarrassment as he had expected her to do.

Q: How was the Philadelphia Orchestra regarded at the time?

Welsh: In 1929, Sergei Rachmaninoff called the Philadelphia Orchestra “the finest orchestra the world has ever heard.” Whether that was absolutely the case, the Philadelphia Orchestra was held in extremely high regard throughout the musical world. It
was considered a major orchestra, a category that at that time included the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia.

Q: The book presents the many challenges orchestra members faced working with Conductor Leopold Stokowski. What one stands out most?

Welsh: Probably his intensity and a certain amount of relentlessness. He imposed the highest standards on his players and expected them to be able to respond instantly to his direction, often jumping through different parts of a score in rehearsal and expecting his musicians to immediately find the correct spot many measures ahead and begin playing without pause. He would work relentlessly to mold certain sections of a work in rehearsal and leave other more routine sections for the players to master on their own, forcing them to pay extraordinary attention to him in concert to make sure that the piece unfolded as the maestro wanted it to.

Q: Was there something about Phillips’s personality that helped her thrive as “one woman in a hundred?”

Welsh: Phillips was very savvy. She seemed to know instinctively how to take care of herself. In 1927 she played for a brief spell in the Roxy Theatre Orchestra in Manhattan, joining her teacher at the time, Florence Wightman, as the only women in an orchestra made up of 110 men. It was a terrible experience. Forced to dodge aggressive passes from her colleagues, she fled after six weeks, vowing never again to play in an all-male orchestra.

Eventually her teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, the brilliant and wily
Carlos Salzedo, talked her into auditioning for the Philadelphia Orchestra by assuring her that there would be no “Roxy Romeos” there. When she did join, Phillips devised a plan for deflecting possible passes that worked well with the men of the orchestra, but not so well with Maestros Stokowski and later Ormandy, both of whom made overtures toward her that could not be deflected so easily. What can a female member of such an organization do when the leader of that organization makes a pass at her – say no and possibly get fired or say yes and eventually be “thrown away like an old shoe?” It was a conundrum that Phillips handled with wit and much aplomb.

Q: What contributions did Phillips make to the performance of the harp?

Welsh: In order to expand its repertoire, Phillips and her husband, Samuel R.  Rosenbaum, commissioned fifteen works for the harp, including what is today considered to be a masterpiece for the instrument, Concerto for Harp and Orchestra op. 25 by Alberto Ginastera, as well as significant works by Nicolai Berezowsky, Norman Dello Joio, Erno Dohnanyi, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ernst Krenek, Harl McDonald, José Serebrier, and Paul White, among others.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Welsh: How fascinating the behind-the-scenes life of the Philadelphia Orchestra was during the 1930s and ‘40s when seen through the eyes of an astute observer who relished the humorous incidents that occurred as well as the greatness that surrounded her.

*****

Author photo credit: Susan Beard Photography