Musical Daughters of Eli: Women Pioneers at Yale

Builders of institutions

Gilmore Music Library Special Collections

Memories of an Elect Lady
[Irene Battell Larned]
(Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1877)

Before women were permitted to become students, faculty, or administrators at Yale, some made a notable contribution as philanthropists. Irene Battell Larned (1811–1877) ranks high among them. She belonged to a wealthy and influential family with strong Yale ties, and she married a Yale professor. A multi-talented musician herself, she played a key role in the establishment of an endowed fund to support sacred music at Yale in 1854, and in the 1855 appointment of Yale’s first instructor of music, Gustave Stoeckel, who happened to be her piano teacher. (Irene’s niece and Gustave’s son married in 1895, thus uniting two important Yale families; more than a century later, Battell Chapel and Stoeckel Hall bear witness to their enduring influence.) Yale officials had long been skeptical of the idea that music deserved an official place in the university, so the creation of the endowment and Stoeckel’s appointment were crucial early steps on the road toward the establishment of the Yale School of Music four decades later.
The book displayed here was published shortly after the death of Irene Battell Larned. It includes contributions by a number of her friends and relatives, but its principal author and editor is not named. The cataloger who wrote on the title page thought it might have been her brother Joseph Battell, but he died in 1874 (unless the cataloger had a different Joseph Battell in mind). Luther Noss, who wrote A History of the Yale School of Music (1984), believed it was her sister Urania Humphrey.

 

Eva J. O'Meara Papers

Eva Judd O’Meara
“Reflections”
Music at Yale
Spring/Summer 1975

When the Yale School of Music moved into Sprague Hall in 1917, one room was set aside for a Music Library. Eva O’Meara (1884–1979), a cataloger in the main library, was temporarily assigned to get the Music library started. Before long, it was assumed, students could manage the library on their own. But O’Meara continued to oversee the Music Library in her spare time for the next seven years, and in 1924 she was finally appointed on a full-time basis.
O’Meara headed the Music Library for the next 28 years, and developed it into a world-class institution. She brought together three very different music collections that had been scattered around the university: the library of the School of Music (which was small and meant for practical performance), music materials from the University Library (which included the major sets of complete works), and the Lowell Mason Library, a collection of more than 10,000 manuscripts and rare published works. She established the Music Library’s tradition of acquiring archival collections (beginning with the papers of Horatio Parker), and she purchased the Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a book-length manuscript that J.S. Bach compiled for the education of his son.
She taught a course in music bibliography at the Yale School of Music, where she was the first female member of the faculty, beginning in 1934.
O’Meara retired in 1952, but she continued to work on library projects for the next quarter century; she was seen carrying a portable typewriter to her carrel in the stacks each day when she was well into her nineties. Just three weeks before her death in 1979, she described the acquisition of the Clavier-Büchlein to a meeting of the Music Library Association (an organization she had helped found, in 1931).

Gilmore Music Library

Howard Schott
“In Memoriam— Sibyl Marcuse (February 13, 1911- March 5, 2003)”
American Musical Instrument Society Newsletter
Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring 2003)

The Yale Collection of Musical Instruments is one of the world’s leading musical instrument museums. Sibyl Marcuse served as its curator from 1953 to 1960. Like Eva O’Meara, the librarian also featured in this exhibit, Marcuse was a brilliant woman whose erudition was not hindered by her lack of a university degree. But unlike O’Meara, who lived nearly all of her life in Connecticut, Marcuse was extraordinarily cosmopolitan: she was born in Germany to a Swiss father and an English mother, she was raised in a variety of European countries, and at other times she lived in China and South America. She spoke an impressive range of languages. While at Yale, Marcuse published A Check-list of Western Instruments in the Collection of Musical Instruments (1958) and Musical Instruments at Yale: A Selection of Western Instruments from the 15th to 20th Centuries (exhibition catalogue, 1960). She helped bring the renowned Belle Skinner Collection of musical instruments to Yale. (Skinner’s collection of rare books and manuscripts, including several remarkable medieval choirbooks, also came to Yale.) In 1964 Marcuse published the work for which she is best known: Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary (1964; revised edition 1975).

Oral History of American Music

Vivian Perlis
Remarks about oral history
From Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)

Fifty years ago, Vivian Perlis, a music librarian and harpist at Yale, began interviewing associates of Charles Ives. This was the beginning of Oral History of American Music (OHAM). She and her colleagues and successors have gone on to interview thousands of notable American musicians, ranging from jazz legends to young Yale composers. We present three short excerpts from Perlis's remarks about the experience of doing oral history.

Vivian Perlis died on July 4, 2019. More information about her life and achievements is available in her New York Times obituary and in an article by Libby Van Cleve, her successor as head of OHAM.

Background music:
1st selection: Charles Ives, Piano Trio. The Monticello Trio.
3rd selection: Leo Ornstein, String Quartet No. 3. Lydian String Quartet.