Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
"Woman as a Musician": American Feminism in 1876
Petra Meyer Frasier, University of Colorado at Boulder
John Garraty has characterized the decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century as a period of
"rapid and starling change,"1 composed of events that were unprecedented in scope and
affecting all aspects of life. Quite frequently, the period is seen in a perforative light
because of the immense amount of social injustice and economic dislocation that occurred.
Joseph Horowitz has aptly ponted out in his work, Wagner Nights, that this viewpoint is
somewhat distorted.2 He feels that a crisis was created between a traditional
system of beliefs and new ideas of social policy in which "public discussion of the
arts, of politics, of religion and philosophy--including such issues as the extermination of the
Indian, the oppression of women, and the vices of capitalism--was vigorous and eloquent."3
The musical writings of one extraordinary woman in the 1860s and 70s reinforces his impressions
of mid-nineteenth-century society.
Fanny Raymond Ritter was born sometime between 1830 and 1840, most likely in England, and died in
Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1891. Bonnie Jo Dopp identifies her father most likely as
Richard Malone, an Irish entertainer who immigrated to America and toured with his daughters
in a family act using the stage name Raymond. Published references to Fanny in magazines and
newspapers prior to her marriage in 1865 to Frederic Louis Ritter,4 often use the names
Fanny Malone Raymond and Katharine Frances Malon Raymond.5
Raymond Ritter excelled at the occupations appropriate for a woman in the nineteenth century.
She was a salon musician, teacher, vocalist, and keyboardist. References to Ritter as a performer
in Dwight's Journal describes her as a fine organist6 and "the mistress of the
German language, in the songs of Schubert, Schumann, and Robert Franz."7 Dwight also
praised her for "extending the horizon" of her students and her recognition that "mere lesson giving
is not sufficient to ensure a pupil's progress" in her teaching at Ohio Female College, a
position that she took in 1860.8
Ritter was also sought after as a translator, writer, and historian, and, in 1859, Ritter's translations,
including Wagner's essays, Ehlert's letters, and a short novel by Elise Polka, began to be
published. Dwight noted her expertise stating that, "[t]he name of Miss Raymond . . . is a
sufficient guaranty for the faithfulness, musical adaptability and genuine poetic feeling of the
translations."9 Given Dwight's own expertise in this area, this was a high
compliment indeed. Ritter's efforts culminated in the translation of the Gesammelte Schriften
und Texten of Robert Schumann, published in book form in 1876. Her first original article
appears to have been "A Sketch of the Troubadours, Trouveres, and Minstrels" for the New York
Weekly Review, reproduced in Dwight's on August 13, 1870. Despite the lack of earlier
publications, we know that Fanny did original research as early as 1868 when Frederic credits her
with writing explanatory notes for her series of "historical recitals" performed at both Vassar and
in New York. The programs included compositions by Byrd, Domenico Scarlatti,
Couperin, Rameau, Lully, Gluck, Handel, Bach, and Mozart. Of the series, Frederic Louis
Ritter writes:
At least two-thirds of the compositions presented at these concerts were performed for the
first time in America. . . . These recitals . . . [were] so novel and artistically instructive
that they excited interest and attention among musical connoisseurs all over the country:
conductors began to arrange their programmes in chronological order; and historical recitals . . .
have become a necessary part of a city winter course or conservatory scheme of concerts.10
Subsequent published writings by Fanny Raymond Ritter included articles on Wagner,
madrigals, and concert reviews. Many of these essays were then compiled in a book
entitled Lyre, Pen, and Pencil published in 1891.11
Of her many works, one of the most significant is her essay, "Woman as a Musician: An Art-Historical
Study."12 The essay was written in 1876 for the Centennial Congress of the Association
for the Advancement of Women.13 Ritter's essay is unmistakably influenced by the renowned
early feminist Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century.14 Bell Gale Chevigny
writes in her book on Fuller, The Woman and the Myth, that Fuller's article:
was rejecting a view that made women timeless and affirming the historical perspective (Ralph
Waldo) Emerson found false. Especially in revising hte essay, she helped women see themselves as
defined by generations of tradition and present circumstances. She offered them a past against which
to shape their future and achieve some measure of selfhood and power in the present.15
Ritter borrows much of Fuller's ideology and the tripartite organizational structure of her essay,
beginning wiht an historical outline, moving to a call for social justice, and ending with a challenge
to change existing conditions for women. Ritter's essay begins as a chronological history from Sappho
to the contemporary women involved in music. She separates out for discussion folk music, balladry, and
troubadour/trouvere songs from Western "art music" finding women to be at the forefront of these genres.
Her points are insightful here particularly given her belief (consistent with the scholarship of her
day) that the Middle Ages were a bleak time when women had few, if any, outlets. Ritter notes that, "It
was not until the end of the 14th century that women began to be anything more than the toys of the
higher (class), the beasts of burden among the lower classes."16 Given that women were often
prohibited by the church from taking part in the service, Ritter is astounded that the patroness of music
was a woman, Saint Cecilia.17 The remainder of the historical section of the essay moves
quickly by time and nationality from Sappho and Miriam through such women as Faustina Bordoni, Caterina
Gabrielli, Madame Catalani, Mrs. Billington, Princess Amalia, Leopoldine Blaherka, Louise Farrenc, and
Camilla Urso.18
The next section of Ritter's essay addresses women's place of contemporary musical society. She notes that
women and men are equals, finding that "talent, not sex, commands the highest prices in this art."19
Ritter decries the lack of great female composers, particularly when lined up next to other artistic
disciplines where she highlights the work of George Sand, Browning, Cushman, and the Brontes, among
others.10 In a bold move, Ritter writes:
And why should not women of sufficient intellectual and especial ability to warrant the possibility of
their obtaining honorable distinction, make an effort . . . . There is surely a feminine side of
composition, as of every other art. And I would suggest the adoption of science of composition as an elective,
if not obligatory, branch of the higher course of study in ladies' colleges.21
Ritter persists with the issue of equality in her essay, recommending that "more attention should be paid
by women to the study of other instruments; the elegant, poetic, but very difficult harp, the
soul-thrilling violin, even the . . . picturesque guitar, are unjustly neglected."22
Ritter concludes Woman as a Musician with specific ideas on changing the status quo. She separates
women in music into three categories which she terms the executant (or performer), the amateur or art-lover,
and the composer.23 She finds that there are reciprocal relationships among all three classes in
which one should not exist without the others. Nonetheless during the 1870s it was the lady amateur
who faced the largest task, for it was she who had the ability and obligation to "foster the young germs
of future American art."24
Amateur women should accomplish this by forming libraries of music, collections of instruments,
creating "private societies for home practice of music," "condemning" that which is unworthy" or of
"insufficient talent" in art, and finally "by sustaining the efforts of gifted women-artists, compelled
by sacred duty or sublime adversity, to make a public display of their talents." Ritter continues: "these
grateful offices fall most naturally into the hands of the women of America, since from the very
nature of life here, the time of men of influence is almost wholly ocupied with the claims of business
or politics."25 As Carol Neuls-Bates has pointed out, Ritter was clearly challenging the
women to whom she was speaking "to assume the role of collective music patrons" in America.26
Woman as a Musician: An Art-Historical Study was widely disseminated in its day, published
as a self-standing booklet, extracted in part as an article for Dwight's Journal,27
and, finally, included as part of Lyre, Pen, and Pencil. Ritter's essay was the first specifically
musical writing of its kind and as such was a catalyst for dialogue in American musical circles
concerning women's place in music. The ideas found in Woman as a Musician seemed tofind very little
resistance in the American press until 1880 when George Upton wrote in his book Woman in Music
that women are incapable of being great composers because:
music is the highest expression of the emotions, and . . . woman is emotional by nature, is it not
one solution of the problem that woman does not musically reproduce them because she herself is emotional
by temperament and nature, and cannot project herself outwardly, any more than she can give outward expression
to other mysterious and deeply hidden traits of her nature. . . . She lives in emotion, and acts from emotion . . .
but she does not see these results as man looks at them. He sees them in their full play, and can reproduce them
in musical notation.28
On the other hand, in 1882, Musical Times reviewed Ritter's essay favorably and found that the only thing
she should have done differently was call for a feminist school of mujsic, similar to the modern
ide of music reflective of "feminist essentialism."29 Frederic Louis Ritter included women
within his general history of American music in 1883. In 1886, Stephen Stratton reviewed Fanny's essay in
American Art Journal calling for more women to pursue professional careers.30 In
1904, Louis Charles Elson included an entire chapter on women in his American music history, The
History of American Music.31 Around this same time, Etude magazine began an
extensive series of articles on women in music grappling with the same issues Ritter had previously
set out.
Even this brief glance brings us full circle to Horowitz's ideas concerning the public discussion of the
"intractable contractions" of the age. Ritter's essay was merely a beginning to the debate continued well
into the twentieth century. Her essay shows her ability to draw on the manycontradictory and intellectual
strands of her age confirms her as America's first female musicologist, and perhaps our first feminist
musicologist. Although her work has, for the most part, been ignored in today's constructions of her
time period, she distilled the thoughts of her time period into a clear and concise critical essay
concerning women in a self-critical manner. It is time to recognize her contributions to musicological
thought of the late nineteenth-century.
Notes
1. John A. Garraty, ed. The Transformation of American Society, 1870-1890 (COlumbia, S.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 1.
2. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
3. Ibid., 7.
4. Brederic Louis Ritter's historical significance as the first comprehensive American Music Historian
and a professor of music at Vassar College is uncontested.
5. Bonnie Jo Dopp, "Fanny Raymond Ritter: America's First Lady of Musicology" (University of
Maryland, April, 1995).
6. J. A. D., Dwight's Journal (Sunday, 22 October 1859), 240.
7. Dwight's Journal (Saturday, December 24, 1864), 363. Fanny sang "Non piu di fiori" from
Mozart's Clemenza di Tito and "Ah s'estino" by Mendelssohn.
8. Dwight's Journal (Saturday, 7 July 1860), 118.
9. Dwight's Journal (Saturday, 26 October 1861), 239 concerning the publication of a
collection of part songs for three and four female voices.
10. Frederic Louis Ritter, Music in America (New York: Scribner, 1883), 386-387.
11. Fanny Raymond Ritter, Lyre, Pen, and Pencil: Essays, Studies, Sketches, ed. Millie
W. Carpenter (New York: Edward Schuberth & Co., 1891).
12. Fanny Raymond Ritter, Woman as a Musician: An Art-Historical Study (New York: Edward
Schuberth & Co., 1876).
13. For more information on these clubs see Mary I. Wood, The History of the General Federation
of Women's Clubs for the First Twenty-Two Years of its Organization (Norwood, MA: Norwood Press,
1912).
14. Originally published in The Dial in 1843 and subsequently revised and published as a
free-standing booklet in 1845.
15. Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's LIfe and Writings, revised
and Expanded Edition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 240.
16. Raymond Ritter, 4.
17. Ibid., 8. Fanny was involved with various Cecelia Societies.
18. Ibid., 8-13. Bordoni was the wife of the composer Hasse; Gabrieli was a pupil of Metastasio;
Catalani was an English singer in the late 1770s; Mrs. Billinton sang in the 1790s; Princess Amalia was
Frederick the Great's sister and an opera composer; Blahetka was a Viennese composer of piano pieces
during Beethoven's lifetime; Farrenc was a composer and professor at the Conservatoire; and Urso was one
of the few female violinists and a contemporary of Ritter.
19. Ibid., 12.
20. Ibid., 10-11.
21. Ibid., 12. It is worth noting that Bonnie Jo Dopp has located one extant vocal composition by
Ritter int he Library of Congress. (Dopp, 28.)
22. Ibid., 13.
23. Ibid., 14.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. Ibid., 16-17.
26. Carol Neuls-Bates, Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the
Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
27. Dwight's Journal (6 January 1877).
28. George Upton, Woman in Music (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1880): 23.
29. Renee Cox, "Recovering Jouissance: An Introduction to Feminist Musical Aesthetics,"
Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991),
331-340.
30. Musical Times (1 October 1882) and American Art Journal (13-27 March 1886). My
thanks to Bonnie Jo Dopp for bringing both of these articles to my attention.
31. Louis Charles Elson, The History of American Music (New York: MacMillan Co., 1904).
Petra Meyer Frazier is a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is
currently writing her dissertation on "Women's Role in the Parlor Song in America: 1820-1870"
and teaching part-time at the University of Tennesse. Her other interests include opera studies,
women's music, and aesthetics.
Updated 4/20/98