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.

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

From the Smithsonian Folkways site:
Innovative and often surprising, Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition explores knowledge older musicians have bequeathed to younger players. Inspired by past banjo masters of frailing and of two- and three-finger styles, Stephen Wade, accompanied by Mike Craver, Russ Hooper, Danny Knicely, James Leva, and Zan McLeod, mines new creative possibilities with pump organ, piano, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, Dobro, rhumba box, washboard, and bass.

(Photo by: MaryE Yeomans)

My favorite part of the interview is hearing Stephen discuss his excitement in finding the origin of the classic song Rock Island Line.

“The profiles gathered here display the breadth of the folk tradition in pre-World War II America, as if a song were on every lip or fingertip, the way cellphones or iPads are today. . . . The Beautiful Music All Around Us is a treasure trove of scrupulous research and on-the-road reportage.”

Previous WSJ review of The Beautiful Music All Around Us here.

• Stephen Wade’s well-reviewed The Beautiful Music All Around Us is available for only $14.97 (regularly $24.95).
• John Caps’s musical biography of Henry Mancini, the creator of “Moon River” and the score to The Pink Panther, along with hundreds of other familiar works. Get it for $17.97 (regularly $29.95).

We’ve recently added our Spring 2013 titles to our website, so even if the book is not yet available, you can pre-order it at the Anniversary Sale discount:

• Murphy Hicks Henry’s Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, that traces the progress of women in bluegrass from Sally Ann Forrester, who played accordion and sang with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys from 1943 to 1946, to present artists such as Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, and the Dixie Chicks. Pre-order now for $17.97 (regularly $29.95).
• David Whiteis’s Southern Soul-Blues highlights some of southern soul’s most popular and important entertainers including classic artists such as Denise LaSalle, the late J. Blackfoot, Latimore, and Bobby Rush–as well as contemporary artists T. K. Soul, Ms. Jody, Sweet Angel, Willie Clayton, and Sir Charles Jones. Pre-order now for $14.97 (regularly $24.95).

If you like American music, we have over 120 other carefully selected and edited titles in-print and on sale until January 31, 2012.

The publications of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series from the University of Illinois Press have advanced into this unknown territory. Each of these editions of major sketchbooks contains a color facsimile of the original source reproduced at full size, together with an interpretative transcription and extensive commentary. Since the facsimiles provide access to the visually fascinating but cluttered and highly revised manuscripts, the transcriptions can inquire into the meaning and not just the letter of Beethoven’s inspiring brainstorms of activity. The accompanying commentaries place this new material into the context of parallel sources and biographical issues, recreating for the reader the composer’s creative struggles.

These new editions can be compared to the first probes of Venus or Mars, since instead of isolated glimpses, the entire surface of the object of investigation is revealed for the first time. The first such edition targeted Beethoven’s major sketchbook of 1820, Artaria 195: Beethoven’s Sketchbook for the Missa solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E Major, Opus 109. The editor, transcriber, and author of the commentary is William Kinderman, general editor of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series.

The second edition of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series makes available the most famous of the composer’s sketchbooks, the “Eroica” Sketchbook used by Beethoven between 1802 and 1804. Startling new insights are revealed in this edition, which was completed jointly by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman. Fresh insight is offered into the genesis of not only the “Eroica” Symphony, but the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the composer’s sole opera Fidelio, and various fascinating unknown and fragmentary projects. Lockwood and Gosman’s edition, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook: A Critical Edition, will be published in early 2013.

Recent research has moved beyond Beethoven and beyond music. Kinderman’s new book from the University of Illinois Press, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág, explores the creativity of major composers from the eighteenth century to the present. He shows that a view of the arts confined to isolated canonic masterpieces is seriously impoverished. At the same time, many secrets about and fresh perspectives on deceptively familiar canonic works can be gained through research that sees cultural products as a struggle emerging out of history. This approach, dubbed “genetic criticism” in France, is a fruitful alternative to the rigid structuralism that so easily blinds commentators to the important spontaneous aspects of artistic activity. A recent interdisciplinary exploration of this approach is Kinderman’s edited book with Joseph E. Jones, Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater from the University of Rochester Press.

Kinderman has recorded as pianist Beethoven’s major keyboard works from the period of the Artaria 195 sketchbook: the final trilogy of Sonatas in E major, A-flat major, and C minor, opp. 109-111 (available on Arietta Records).  For the second movement of the Sonata in E major, op. 109, an innovative website allows the user to explore all stages in Beethoven’s creation of the music, tracing the process from initial sketch to finished work, acorn to oak. The facsimiles of the sketches, transcriptions of their content, and realization in sound of the music are coordinated, drawing on the material from the three-volume edition of Artaria 195.

Another much-praised recording by Kinderman of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is also available on Arietta Records. Kinderman’s book Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations from Oxford University Press and his CD recording of this work were a major influence on Moises Kaufman’s much-performed play, 33 Variations.

Professor Nettl’s works include Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, which was called, “Light and entertaining, moving and head-noddingly simple without sacrificing the complexity of its implications. . . . Classic Bruno Nettl.” by the Journal of Folklore Research, and the classic introduction to ethnomusicology, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts, in its second edition.

Congratulations, Professor Nettl!

Greg Adams: Stephen, you are certainly no stranger to Banjo Newsletter’s readers. For example, in addition to your own interviews with fellow players, you yourself were featured on the cover of three previous issues of BNL—September 1983, September 1989, and November 1998. You also did cover stories of Tony Ellis, Tom Paley, and your mentor, Fleming Brown. Then, in November 2005, BNL included an interview for your Smithsonian Folkways release “Hobart Smith, In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes.” Today I’d like to speak with you about your two recent milestones—“Banjo Diary,” and your new book, “The Beautiful Music All Around Us”What were your motives for doing these two projects?

Stephen Wade: Well, maybe the first question should be, “Why did it take you so long to finish these projects?” Well, it’s interesting. For “Banjo Diary,” because I was dealing with great guys—my fellow great players on the album—it took two days to record, two days to do some fixes, two days of mixing, and one afternoon of mastering. On the other hand, in the purported solitude of a writer’s garret, “The Beautiful Music All Around Us” took eighteen years to complete, sixteen of it spent in writing and research. In May 2011 the book was finally accepted for publication. But because I was just so energized by then, I couldn’t slow down. So I worked from that May to October trying to figure out what might constitute a new banjo record. Originally, my idea for “Banjo Diary” focused on DC’s banjo history, quite different from what it became. Ultimately, it very much connects to my film, “Catching the Music.” And as you know, that documentary addresses the music that inspired my teachers.