COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR, AUTHOR, FOUNDER OF MUSIC SCHOOL. in America, was described by JANE ADDAMS as "one of the three creative geniuses at Hull-

Transcription

1 Pamela G. Elrod, Eleanor Sophia Smith, in Women Building Chicago : A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001): SMITH, ELEANOR SOPHIA June 15, 1858-June 30, 1942 COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR, AUTHOR, FOUNDER OF MUSIC SCHOOL Eleanor Smith, a prolific composer of vocal music and a pioneer in the field of music education in America, was described by JANE ADDAMS as "one of the three creative geniuses at Hull- House" (quoted in "Eleanor Smith, Once Hull House 'Genius', Is Dead"). The second of seven children, Smith was born in Atlanta, Illinois, to Willard Newton and Matilda (Jasperson) Smith. Her father was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln and served as one of the original team of Lincoln campaigners in southern Illinois. Smith's musical abilities in childhood and adolescence were largely self-taught. During her childhood she displayed a remarkable ear, duplicating melodies and harmonies at the piano with great accuracy. She taught herself to play the piano and began formal musical training only when she was eighteen years old, at which time she started voice and composition lessons. Troubled with very poor vision and a possibility of blindness, Smith was sometimes forced to use her eyes for only a brief period each day. Her musical drive was so strong, however, that she would often use whatever time she could to work on the composition at hand. In the 1880s, Smith moved to Berlin, Germany, a center for music education, to study voice with Julius Hey and composition with Moritz Moszkowski. During her three years there she met and became friends with a young woman, Amalie Hannig, who was a piano instructor at the Klindworth Conservatory. Smith and Hannig not only shared a love for music, they shared similar pedagogical philosophies as well. Both women emphasized the need for strong technical

2 training for musicians. They believed this training should focus on physical facility as well as mental aptitude and that both of these should be brought to life through "emotional feeling and expressiveness" ("Eleanor Smith's Brief Autobiography," 1). Smith wrote in her unpublished autobiography: "We were quite sure that all these must be cultivated in childhood by intelligent teachers. Moreover, as music must be beautiful, its disciples should early be given the best music possible" (p. 1). Smith and Hannig would later have the opportunity to put this philosophy into practice, when they became colleagues at Hull-House. In autumn 1890, Smith arrived in Chicago. Soon after, she visited Hull-House, a social settlement that had been founded by Jane Addams and ELLEN GATES STARR in September Soon after her initial visit, Smith began teaching music at the settlement to children and adults from the surrounding neighborhood. At the time, the Hull-House neighborhood was composed primarily of European immigrants. Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Italians, and Russian and Polish Jews predominated. Amalie Hannig joined the Hull-House staff as a piano teacher a short time later. Courses in singing, ear training, and reading and writing of music were taught by Smith in the Hull-House reception room, which had an upright piano. Children who displayed exceptional aptitude were also given piano lessons. Music courses were offered from October to June. In later years, summer instruction was added. Fees were, in Smith's words, "negligible" ("Eleanor Smith's Brief Autobiography," 2), and sometimes [end page 810] sheet music was furnished at no charge. Although the facilities were at times inadequate and the students often came from impoverished families, Smith did not scrimp when it came to applying the philosophical ideals she had formed during her own training. From the beginning, she was an exacting teacher who held her students to the highest musical standards. She employed

3 instructional materials of the highest caliber, and all music students were expected to study beyond their chosen instruments; singers studied piano and instrumentalists studied voice. Smith's strong philosophical convictions, coupled with her energy and devotion to the Hull-House music program, attracted enough students to establish the Hull-House Music School in 1893, the first settlement music school in the country. The music school was financed in large part by MARY ROZET SMITH (no relation to Eleanor Smith), a wealthy benefactor of Hull- House. In 1895, the music school was moved onto the fourth floor of the newly opened Smith building referred to as the Children's House, which had been built with money donated by Mary Rozet Smith's family. The school remained there until 1903, when it moved one last time to six rooms overlooking the quadrangle. One of these rooms served as a music library. In 1897 Eleanor Smith moved into Hull-House, becoming a full-time resident. By 1924 she had moved into the home of Mary Rozet Smith, where she lived until shortly after Mary Smith's death in Records indicate that Eleanor Smith moved back to Hull-House and remained a resident there until her retirement in Within the first few years of her association with Hull-House, Smith initiated one of the settlement's most enduring and popular traditions, the annual Christmas concert, which featured a series of tableaux or "Living Pictures" ("Eleanor Smith's Brief Autobiography," 4), static reenactments presented simultaneously with musical performances. The music included traditional seasonal pieces and original compositions by Smith and other Hull-House residents. The first concerts were strictly musical offerings; later, tableaux designed in the manner of such Renaissance artists as Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli were added. Smith and her staff conducted research to coordinate appropriate music with each tableau. The staging of these tableaux was created by the Hull-House dramatics students under the direction of EDITH de

4 NANCREDE, while the costumes were designed and executed by Hull-House Art School director ENELLA BENEDICT and her students. For many neighborhood residents the annual Christmas concert-and-tableaux presentation at Hull-House was the high point of the year. Every holiday season, Bowen Hall was packed to capacity with neighbors eagerly awaiting the unveiling of the first dramatic and colorful tableau. The annual Christmas concert was only one of the many programs initiated by Smith and presented by the students of the music school. Under Smith's direction, the Hull-House Music School grew into a significant artistic force in Chicago, featuring regular choral, orchestral, and chamber music performances as well as solo voice and instrumental recitals. Smith composed an extraordinary amount of music for the school, including vocal solos, shorter choral works, and operettas, which she frequently referred to as cantatas. Competent instructors were brought in to teach. A number of students went on to have careers in music, while many more developed a lifelong appreciation for music. Art Hodes, the renowned jazz pianist, recalled his early music training with Smith at Hull-House in a 1963 Down Beat article: "One week I'd be in the soprano section, the next, alto, and so on. Switch you around so you never got set, but they knew what they were doing... and today how I thank her [Smith]. She developed my hearing; she made it possible for me to hear (at least) three parts to a tune. These were dedicated sisters; it couldn't have been the money. The singing class was free, and the piano lesson was two-bits" (p. 39). Smith's strong views on music pedagogy were compatible with contemporary trends in education. In 1897, Francis W. Parker of the Chicago Normal School for teachers put Smith in charge of the Department of Vocal Music. In 1902, Smith began similar associations with John Dewey, a leading educational philosopher, who invited her to teach music to aspiring teachers at the University of Chicago's School of Education and to assist him in revising curriculum for

5 music education. In addition, her pedagogical and philosophical ideals found expression through courses she taught at the Froebel Kindergarten College and the Chicago Kindergarten College. Smith also joined the effort to introduce music into the Chicago public schools and became a leader in that movement with the publication in 1898 of her first textbook series, The Modem Music Series. A collaborative venture with Robert Foresman, this series brought to music instruction the somewhat controversial "new education" (Birge, 154) movement, which focused on understanding the nature of the child and incorporating these insights into educational methods. A musical manifestation of this movement was the so-called "song method" (p. 152) of teaching, a process whereby students learned the elements and skills for reading music from songs. This method was radically different from the traditional "sight-singing" (p. 153) method in which students relied on drilling and memorizing single musical elements at a time. The Modern Music Series incorporated the song method as its educational premise, and Smith, serving as editor of the series, used many of her own songs as teaching tools in the books. Hailed as the standard-bearer for a new age in music education, the series was enormously popular and spawned a number of other textbook series that adopted similar pedagogical ideas. Smith's second series, The Eleanor Smith Music Series, was published in In 1915, in celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, Hull-House published the Hull- House Songs, five pieces with music composed by Eleanor Smith. These songs expressed Hull- House's support of various social issues and included the "Suffrage Song," "The Land of the Noonday Night" about unsafe conditions in the mines, and "The Shadow Child" with words by Chicago poet HARRIET MONROE, which reflected the agonies of child labor. In 1936, Smith retired from the Hull-House Music School for health reasons. Her sister, Gertrude, an accomplished pianist who also taught music at the settlement, took over as director

6 of the school. Eleanor Smith's remaining years were spent at a relative's farm in Midland, Michigan. There she died of pneumonia, contracted after a fall that broke her hip. She was cremated [end page 811] and her ashes were placed in a family plot near Annapolis, Maryland. At the time of her death, the music school that she had founded some fifty years before boasted an enrollment of approximately three hundred adults and children. Several months after Smith's death, during a memorial service held in her honor at Hull-House, two of the rooms in which she taught were named the Eleanor Smith Rooms. Smith's prodigious musical output was a mirror of her life, reflecting her multifaceted career as a composer, voice teacher, choral conductor, opera coach, pianist, and music educator. Through her work at Hull-House over more than forty years, she inspired thousands of young people and adults in classes and music productions. She sought the highest standards in her own art and expected the same level of achievement from her students and colleagues. Her ideals were reflected in all facets of her career, and her impact on American music education, through her work with progressive educators John Dewey and Francis W. Parker, was far-reaching. Sources. The Eleanor and Gertrude Smith Papers (including published compositions and unpublished manuscripts as well as programs from Hull-House Music School events) are in UIC Spec. Coll. Her unpublished operettas include "A Fable in Flowers" (composed 1918), "The Troll's Holiday" (composed 1905), "The Merman's Bride" (composed 1928), and "The Golden Asp" (possibly unfinished). Also in the collection is "Service to Honor the Memory of Eleanor Smith, Founder of Hull-House Music School," October 3, 1942, a useful source of biographical data. Alma Birmingham's Papers at UIC Spec. Coll. include a copy of "Eleanor Smith's Brief Autobiography," typescript, Information comes from Pamela Elrod's Ph.D. dissertation

7 in progress, "Music at Hull-House: An Overview of Choral Music Events from 1893 to 1942 and a Study of the Life and Works of Eleanor Smith, Founder of the Hull-House Music School" (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Smith's great-great nephew, Richard Shipps, provided family information in an interview with Pamela Elrod on November 6, In addition to the textbooks and songbooks mentioned above, Eleanor Smith wrote Songs for Little Children (1887), Song Pictures: Poems (1891), Twelve Songs for Twelve Boys (1896), Singing Verses for Children with Lydia Avery Coonley-Ward (1897), The Beginner's Book of Vocal Music (1898), Songs of Life and Nature (1898), A First Book in Vocal Music (1891), Second Book in Vocal Music with C. E. Richard Mueller (1898), The Alternate Third Book of Vocal Music (1898), A Third Book in Vocal Music (1899), A Handbook for the Teaching of Vocal Music in the Schools (1900), A Primer of Vocal Music (1900), Singing Verses for Children (1900), A Third Book in Vocal Music with C. E. Richard Mueller (1901), The Alternate Third Book of Vocal Music (1903), The Common School Book of Vocal Music (1904), The Fourth Book of Vocal Music (1905), The High School Book of Vocal Music (1905), The Eleanor Smith Music Course (1908), The Eleanor Smith Music Course Manual (1909), Songs of a Little Child's Day (1910), The Special Third Book of Vocal Music (1910), The Eleanor Smith Music Primer (1911), Songs of a Little Child's Day (1915), The Children's Hymnal with Charles H. Farnsworth and C. A. Fullerton (1918), Song Devices and Jingles (1920). Edward Bailey Birge's History of Public School Music in the United States (1928) provides information on Smith's role in music education as well as insight into pedagogical trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See also Art Hodes, "Sittin' In," Down Beat, August 1, An obituary, "Eleanor Smith, Once Hull House Genius, Is Dead," is in Chicago Sun, July 1, [ends on page 812]

8 Credit: Women Building Chicago : A Biographical Dictionary, by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, (Indiana University Press, 2001). Reprinted with permission from the Chicago Area Women s History Council.