Mary Howe

Mary Howe Papers, JPB 04-39. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The papers of the American composer and patron of music Mary Howe consist primarily of scores, correspondence, biographical material, concert programs and business papers. They also include scrapbooks, photographs and books. Mary Howe (b Richmond, VA, 4 April 1882; d Washington, DC, 14 Sept. 1964) was an American composer, pianist, and patron of music in Washington D.C., where she grew up and lived all her life. Born Mary Carlisle, she studied piano with Richard Burmeister in Germany and Ernest Hutcheson and Harold Randolph in the United States. She also studied composition with Gustav Strube and graduated with an Artist Diploma in composition from the Peabody Conservatory in 1922. Howe had already begun raising children when she attended Peabody, and she continued to pursue her career while meeting family obligations. She toured in a two-piano team with Anne Hull from 1917 - 1935 and studied with Nadia Boulanger in 1933. A prolific composer as well as a pianist, Howe worked in many genres: songs for voice and piano, solo piano, piano duo, organ, carillon, violin, cello, flute, chamber music, chorus, ballet, chamber orchestra, and full orchestra, in addition to various combinations of all these; she often reorchestrated the same composition for multiple settings. Her ballet Cards (1936), for example, was set for two pianos, two pianos and orchestra, and chamber orchestra, and her song Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1959) has scores for two pianos and for orchestra. Howe created many song settings for poems, including cycles by Goethe (Sieben Goetheliedchen, 1931-1940) and Rilke (Four Poems By Rainer Maria Rilke. Her compositions for orchestra include Stars (1927), Sand (1928), Rock (1954), the suite Potomac River (1940), Agreeable Overture (1948), American Piece (1933) and Castellana (1930). Her orchestral work was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the NBC and BBC orchestras, and many other orchestras in the United States, Europe and South America. Her compositions were recorded and issued by RCA, Columbia, CRI and the Washington radio station WCFM. Howe’s music was published by Schirmer, Carl Fischer, Composers Press Inc., Galaxy Corporation and Oxford University Press, among others. Howe and her husband, Walter Bruce Howe, a lawyer, were prominent Washington socialites and were among the co-founders in 1931 of the National Symphony Orchestra; they were close friends of the orchestra’s first music director, Hans Kindler. Howe also helped found the Chamber Music Society of Washington (later the Friends of Music of the Library of Congress) and the Society of American Women Composers. She was active in the National Federation of Music Clubs, the League of Composers and the National Association of American Composers and Conductors. She was also a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Huntington Hartford Foundation. Toward the end of her life she was on the board of the National Cultural Center (later renamed the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts). Indenbaum, Dorothy and Carol J. Oja. “Howe, Mary”, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 18 Apr. 2005), The Mary Howe Papers document in great detail the life and career of an important American composer and patron of music in the city of Washington, DC. They consist of 36.3 linear feet of material dating from 1884 to 1972, with the bulk dating from ca. 1910 to 1964. The Papers consist primarily of scores from every phase of Howe’s compositional life; professional and personal correspondence and writings; biographical material; concert programs and business papers. The collection also contains scrapbooks, photographs and a small set of books. This series contains work from every phase of Howe’s composing career. It includes both published and unpublished scores and parts, sketches, song