| 06-26 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Antonia Brico, Dutch-born, American
symphonic orchestra conductor and talented pianist
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Pius XI.
Antonia Brico, Dutch-born, American
symphonic orchestra conductor and talented pianist.
Born June 26, 1902, Antonia
Brico, Dutch-born, American symphonic orchestra conductor and talented
pianist.
Brico studied Bach for 15 years with Albert Schweitzer,
studied conducting for six years with Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston
Symphony (1913), first American to graduate from the Master School of Conducting
at Berlin State Academy of Music, made her debut February 1930, conducting
the Berlin Philharmonic, the first woman to conduct a concert in Berlin,
and that July conducted at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1933 conducted unemployed
New York and Westchester musicians at the Metropolitan Opera House as a
fundraiser and famed singer John Charles Thomas refused to appear on the
program because her fame would have upstaged him.
In November 1934 she organized an orchestra of 100
women musicians who performed at New York's Town Hall sharing profits since
there was no money for salaries. Although highly praised by Sibelius amongst
others, her conducting career only lasted a short time because, as she
explained, "I was a novelty at first
and by 1937 the conducting jobs disappeared."
In actuality Arthur Judson,
who had a monopoly on conductors and managed the New York Philharmonic
and the Philadelphia Orchestra, was merely following the opinions of Mrs.
Charles S. Guggenheimer (B. 10-22-1882) whose purse strings were able to
enforce her opinion "(that) the greatest disgrace in the world (is)
for a woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic."
In 1942, Brico began directing and conducting the
Denver Businessmen's Orchestra in its five-concerts-a-year and continued
for more than 30 years without a contract. In 1948 she was named permanent
conductor and in 1969 the orchestra was renamed The Brico Symphony
in her honor.
She had turned to the teaching of voice, piano,
and conducting to earn her living. One of her pupils was folksinger Judy
Collins who with Jill Godmilow produced the award-winning film Antonia:
A Portrait of the Woman, (1974) to highlight a career stymied by gender
prejudice. She received an honorary Ph.D. from Mills College (1938) as
well as more than eight other honorary degrees.
As a result of the feminist activism, at 73 for a
brief moment she had what should have been hers for a lifetime as she conducted
at Avery Fisher Hall in Los Angles to an overflow audience who listened
with their ears and not their gender prejudices.
|
1694: England. Early feminist Mary Astell
writes "A Proposal to the Ladies," which is not widely distributed
because of reigning social restraints against women - the very thing she
protested.
|
|
Artemisia of Halicarnassus was probably
the first woman to have a price put on her head and certainly the first
for being the scourge of a naval fleet. Artemisia took command of her husband's
five-ship fleet at his death in battle. She was one of the important commanders
of Xerxes (there were several women generals) and the Athenians after the
battle of Marathon offered a reward for her capture. She was never captured.
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06-26 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 06-26-1767, Sarah Pierce - U.S. educator
who founded the highly influential Litchfield Academy. Among her students
were Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher.
B. 06-26-1812, Fanny (Frances Flora Bond) Palmer
- U.S. lithographer and staff artist for Currier and Ives. Critics
consider her most important work under the C&I imprint as "The
High Bridge at Harlem, N.Y" but she did dozens and dozens of others.
FP helped perfect the lithographic crayon. She was able to draw directly
on the lithographic stone and taught Americans how to print background
tints.
B. 06-26-1881, Jessie Field Shambaugh - U.S.rural
educator known as the mother of 4-H.
B. 06-26-1890, Jeanne Eagels - U.S. dramatic
actress who played Sadie Thompson in Rain almost 1,500 times in four
years on Broadway and on tour.
B. 06-26-1892, Pearl S. Buck was one of
the first writers to try to explain the Far East to Western readers. She
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938 for her many novels of Chinese
life, especially among the peasantry. She had won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize
for her classic novel The Good Earth which was made into a terrible
movie.
PB also wrote some historical novels with an American
setting under the pseudonym John Sedges. She adopted nine children and
established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to support or find homes for Amerasian
children who are abandoned by their American fathers throughout Asia and
for abandoned children worldwide. Family pressures had forced her to turn
to writing when she was almost 40 and in all, she published more than 100
books, innumerable articles and delivered hundreds of speeches.
Modern critics have attempted to downgrade her novels
in the usual fashion of erasing women from history by saying they were
propaganda.
She was the daughter of American missionaries who
served in China,
B. 06-26-1911, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, named
the world's greatest woman athlete for the first half of the 20th century.
The Babe was named top woman athlete in the U.S. for 1931, 1945-47, and
1950, and 1954. She won two gold medals at the 1932 Olympics in track and
field and set the world records in the javelin throw and in the 80-meter
hurdles. Babe won a total of 114 golf tournaments, 83 amateur golf tournaments,
31 on the P.G.A. tour, with a string of seventeen consecutive major women's
tournaments. She won an AAU championship in 1932, was on the amateur all-American
basketball team from 1930-32, and even pitched exhibition for the St. Louis
Cardinals. The 1911 birthdate is according to her sister and baptismal
records.
QUOTES DU JOUR
PIUS XI:
"Any
use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately
frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offence (sic) against
the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded
with the guilt of a grave sin....
"However we may pity the mother whose health
and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there
yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the
innocent...."
-- Pius XI: Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.
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