By Susan E. Davis
Has Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “How Do I Love Thee?” been set to music by a woman composer? Mezzo-soprano Kathleen Shimeta was planning a Valentine’s Day recital for 2000, and if the music existed, she wanted to sing it. Discovering that Canadian-American composer Gena Branscombe (1881-1977) had set the poem to music in 1907 started Shimeta on a journey that has led her from research to concerts to CD recording to dramatic recital. In the process Shimeta has unearthed the legacy of a brilliant composer—a woman musically of her time but in other ways before her time. It is fitting that now, when women’s accomplishments in all creative endeavors are finally being recognized, Branscombe’s music is again being sung and appreciated.
Shimeta found a reference to Branscombe’s six-song cycle of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in the book, A Singer’s Guide to the American Art Song, 1870-1980, and requested the music from Recital Publications.1 Branscombe called the cycle Love in a Life. When Shimeta showed her accompanist, Martin Hennessy, the music, he exclaimed, “You must record these.” Inspired to find out more about Branscombe, Shimeta was soon pouring through nearly 40 boxes of Branscombe’s original papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. There she found the Ph.D. dissertation that Laurine Elkins-Marlow had written about Branscombe based on a series of personal interviews with the composer between 1976 and 1977. Included was an analysis of Branscombe oeuvre—over 150 songs, 56 arrangements, a number of major choral and orchestral works, and an unfinished opera—and intimate details about her life as composer, conductor, choral leader, professional and civic activist, wife, and mother.
Shimeta was stunned. Here was a composer of exceptional stature whose emotionally rich, melodic work had been widely heard and heralded for several decades in the mid-20th century but who was virtually unknown today. Shimeta was determined to change that. So she contacted Elkins-Marlow, who currently teaches music at Texas A&M University, and Gena Tenney Phenix, Branscombe’s eldest daughter, and set about discovering as much as she could about Gena Branscombe, her music, her career, her life.2
Gena Branscombe was born on November 4, 1881, in Picton, Ontario, Canada, the only daughter of Henry William Branscombe and Sara Elizabeth Allison. Her paternal ancestors had emigrated from the villages of Exeter and Branscombe in Devonshire, England, while her maternal ancestors, who settled in 1640 in the Hudson Valley, moved to Ontario’s Bay of Quinte after the United Empire Loyalists lost the war.
“My earliest musical memory is of being awakened, in what seemed to be the middle of the night, by sounds of such haunting, unearthly beauty that my little three-and-a-half-year-old heart almost burst with longing,” wrote Branscombe in a special 1962 issue of Music Clubs Magazine. “This probably accounts for the love affair I’ve had with brass all my life.”3 By the time Branscombe was five she was playing piano by ear and improvising her own tunes. At six she began accompanying her brother Clarence, ten years her elder, when he gave recitals, and soon she was improvising accompaniments at home, church and school. A brilliant student, she graduated from high school with honors at age 15.
In 1897 Branscombe won a scholarship to the Chicago Musical College, where she studied piano with Rudolph Ganz and composition with Felix Borowski. Although it was hard for her to be so far away from home at such a young age, Branscombe excelled academically and became self-sufficient, teaching piano students and accompanying singers to supplement her income. Twice winning a gold medal for excellence in composition, she earned a post-graduate degree in 1901 and was invited to join the piano faculty. In addition to teaching, she studied the art of song writing for two years with Alexander von Fielitz. Her songs were first published in Chicago and Toronto in the 1890s, while she was still a student; her last song was published in 1957. In the early 20th century, she signed a contract with music publisher Arthur P. Schmidt of Boston, with whom she had a long and fruitful association, as well as Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes, and Wa-Wan Press.
In 1907, the year she composed the six-song cycle Love in a Life. Branscombe was asked to start the music department at co-ed Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. During the two years she was there, she met John Ferguson Tenney, a graduate of Yale and a Harvard- educated lawyer from Methuen, Massachusetts, to whom she became engaged. Wanting to advance her education before settling down, Branscombe went to Berlin in the academic year 1909-10 to study composition with the renowned Engelbert Humperdinck and piano with Ganz.
Elkins-Marlow wrote that Branscombe’s songs were described by critics as “harmonically adventuresome,” “expressive,” and “well-crafted for the voice,” and audiences often demanded immediate encores.4 Arthur Farwell, in Music in America, described her music as follows:
Her work is an outpouring of moods, moods of an intensity and richness which demand a high musical color scheme. This, not science—though Miss Branscombe is well grounded in theory—but a startling character of intuition, provides her withal. Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hair-breadth escapes. No considered harmonic or modularity scheme gives her music its richness of color; she continually leaps into apparently remote progressions without looking before, and the same intuition which suggested the hazard suggests also the way out, which comes with surprising facility.5
On October 5, 1910, Branscombe married Tenney in her Canadian hometown. The song “Glück” (Happiness), dedicated to Tenney and based on a German text by Joseph von Eichendorff, which she wrote during her year abroad, was sung at their wedding. Elkins- Marlow describes as “an exuberant song with kaleidoscopic harmonic changes” that was “a favorite of concert singers in both German and English translations.”6 It is interesting to note that Branscombe chose to use her maiden name professionally. She wrote that Amy Beach had to use “all her husband’s initials (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) professionally as a gesture of appeasement to the tradition of the Boston Back Bay Society in which she moved.”7 Not so for Gena Branscombe. Using her maiden name showed her determination to be respected on her own terms as an independent “modern” woman.
Tenney was proud of his wife’s musical talent and ambition and wanted her to excel, so he suggested that the only way they could succeed as a two-career family— which was unheard of at the time—was if they lived in New York City. There she became a United States citizen and bore four daughters: Gena in 1911, Vivian in 1913 (died in 1989), Betty in 1916 (died in 1919), and Beatrice in 1919 (died in 1954). Juggling family and household responsibilities with the help of a nanny/cook/housekeeper, Branscombe continued to compose, accompany, coach, perform and promote her work. She could not have “had it all” (using the contemporary term) without the total support and devotion of her husband. She especially appreciated that he took the girls to Sunday school, giving her a few quiet, uninterrupted hours in which to compose each week.
And Branscombe was prolific, especially through the 1930s. Not only did she continue to compose songs, often based on famous poems but sometimes set to her own words, but she also stretched herself to compose ever more ambitious choral and orchestral works. In 1919, the same year that daughter Betty died and Beatrice was born, Branscombe completed the text, music and score of a major work: the choral drama Pilgrims of Destiny for solo voices, chorus and orchestra. Written after extensive research and based on the last days of the Mayflower’s voyage and the Pilgrims’ sighting land, the work was first performed in 1929 as the closing event of 16th Biennial Convention of the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC). The performance was fittingly given at Memorial Hall in Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the New England North Shore Festival Chorus, augmented with other area choruses, and the Boston Festival Orchestra conducted by Arthur B. Keene.
An anonymous reviewer of the concert in the June 22, 1929 Musical Courier wrote: “Miss Branscombe has written with vision, imagination, and sincerity. The music is full of inspiration and is marked by workmanship. Without doubt, Gena Branscombe has produced an American choral work of foremost rank.” Of the concert Branscombe wrote, “My Invisible Trumpets were playing a very special fanfare—as my beloved young Pilgrims came to life. Looking out, I could almost see the Mayflower riding at anchor.”8
The National League of American Pen Women, which featured concerts of its members’ works at national conventions, awarded Pilgrims of Destiny its annual prize for the finest work by a woman in 1928. And in 1960 the Library of Congress requested the original score, orchestral parts, and the published vocal score for its permanent collection.
In 1930 Branscombe succeeded Beach as the second president of the Society of American Women Composers, which also sponsored concerts. But the organization was forced to disband in 1932, a victim of the Great Depression. Branscombe was active in many service and professional organizations, including the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the National Association of American Composers and Conductors.
It was during the family’s brief move in the early 1920s to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, where Branscombe conducted a local community chorale, that she was inspired to study choral and orchestral conducting with Chalmers Clifton and Albert Stoessel. Not only was she sought after to conduct her own works, but she established the Branscombe Choral in 1934, which evolved from a chorus she was asked to conduct for the American Women’s Association in New York. The Choral presented two concerts a year for the next 20 years. In addition to its radio broadcasts, the red-robed chorale, made up of between 80 and 100 women, was invited to sing at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City and at an early meeting of the United Nations in Lake Success in 1946. Until Branscombe disbanded the Choral in 1954 (at the age of 73), she wrote new choral music for the group and made numerous SSAA arrangements and small orchestra accompaniments for her own and other composers’ songs.
Branscombe often featured the work of women composers at the chorale’s annual Spring Town Hall concerts. In the Music Clubs Magazine article she cited performances of the Maid of Orleans by Margaret Starr McLain, Marian Bauer’s China, and Now Silently April Takes a Battlefield by Myra Boitos. “Had there been time, space, money,” she wrote, “I could have done hundreds of programs devoted entirely to the works, large and small, of women composers.”9
But Branscombe did plenty to promote “women’s work” through her activism in the women’s club and music club movements from the 1920s through the 1940s. The following tribute to Branscombe was published in the Autumn 1977 Music Clubs Magazine: “Notably, one of her projects for NFMC [National Federation of Music Clubs] was the preparation of over 30 programs of works by American women composers for distribution to conductors throughout the nation. This labor of love entailed months of painstaking research and correspondence, and was a great service towards proper recognition and creative works.”
Active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), Branscombe served as Music Chair during a period when “Music at Every Meeting” was a national objective. One of Branscombe’s highest honors was being asked to plan the music for and conduct the National Massed Chorus of 1,000 women in Atlantic City at the GFWC’s 1941 Diamond Jubilee Convention celebrating 50 years of women’s achievements. Branscombe wrote about that “thrilling experience” in the Music Clubs Magazine: “I had the feeling (at my inner listening post) that St. Michael himself might be playing 1st trumpet! There were no new works by women sung that evening; I chose well-known (and loved) works by Mrs. Beach, Harriet Ware, Mabel Daniels, and Annabel Morris Buchanan.”10
Branscombe’s work was also featured at numerous NFMC conferences. In addition to the 1929 concert, her Youth of the World for chorus and orchestra was performed at the 1951 convention in Salt Lake City; her suite for French horn, Pacific Sketches, was played at the 1956 convention in New York; and A Joyful Litany was first performed at the 1967 convention in New York. Branscombe wrote Prayer for Song as an invocation for the NFMC.
Branscombe’s work was recognized far beyond the United States. Some of her compositions, such as Youth of the World, were performed in England, The Netherlands and the Philippines. Canada also claimed her as a native daughter. Her music for Arthur Stringer’s Our Canada from Sea to Sea was played by bands and sung by choruses during a 1939 visit that King George and Queen Elizabeth made to Canada and also during a state dinner at the White House for the royal couple. In 1958, at age 77, Branscombe penned the hymn Arms That Have Sheltered Us, which was adopted two years later by the Canadian Navy. In 1961 the United States Information Service sent an article about her life and work to all its European centers to illustrate how creative women in America carry on their home and professional lives. The article included the statement: “She has done perhaps more than anyone else to revitalize and expand the repertory for the nation’s many women’s choral groups.”
Marion Morrey Richter, writing about Branscombe’s 90th birthday celebration, quoted Tatiana Balkoff Drowne as saying, “If one took a candle as the symbol of the soul, the lights of most people would burn feebly, but Gena Branscombe’s light would shine like a giant flame, because she has been able to fulfill herself and live a life on two quite separate planes, raising a distinguished family while nurturing a rare creative talent.”11
Still, Branscombe’s life was not all peaches and cream. The Great Depression meant she had to contribute to the family income from the ’30s on and especially after Tenney’s death in 1949. Based on her correspondence with music publisher Arthur P. Schmidt, whose archives are preserved in the Library of Congress, Elkins-Marlow concluded that Branscombe “was constantly weighing the potential marketability of works against her desire to grow technically and musically and give free rein to her imagination. Consequently, the time and resources required for creation of large-scale works to which she aspired especially after the 1920s eluded her, and her published works were usually pragmatic and market-driven.”12
Assessing Branscombe’s overall musical contribution, Elkins-Marlow wrote: Her harmonic vocabulary is consistent with…a late Romantic/early 20th-century chromatic tonal palette filled with kaleidoscopic common-tone chord changes, with occasional excursions into modality of 4th based harmonies for oriental or bell-like effects. In the early years, Branscombe was hailed as an exponent of the contemporary school of composition. As time passed, her music would appear increasingly conservative in light of developments such as duodecaphonic technique, bitonality and other dissonance-drenched 20th century trends that she declined to use. 13
Fortunately, Elkins-Marlow was able to interview Branscombe in depth for a year and a half before her death on July 26, 1977, at the age of 96 after a brief illness. During the funeral service at Riverside Church five of her compositions were played, including “Ah! Love, I Shall Find Thee” and “Procession” for trumpet and piano from The Bells of Circumstance, an unfinished opera started in 1928 that paid homage to Canada’s French settlers. On her tombstone in Methuen, Massachusetts, next to those of her beloved husband and two daughters, were inscribed the words: “She walked to the sound of invisible trumpets.”
“It’s a good life, being a woman composer, worth all the hard work that goes into it,” wrote Branscombe. “My trumpets are still sounding—and will sound, I know, all the way.”14
Branscombe’s trumpets are still sounding—figuratively if not literally—thanks to Kathleen Shimeta. Not only has she meticulously researched Branscombe’s life and work with the aid of Elkins-Marlow and Gena Phenix, but between September 2001 and June 2002 she recorded 28 of Branscombe’s songs with her accompanist Martin Hennessy at Town Hall where the Branscombe Choral performed years before. The resulting CD, entitled “Ah! Love, I Shall Find Thee: Songs of Gena Branscombe” was released in November 2003 by Albany Records, and Shimeta has given concerts of the works. “Having 150 songs from which I could only select 28 to record was a bit overwhelming,” said Shimeta,15 who has sung widely in Europe and the United States after earning a Master of Music degree from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.
After consulting with Gena’s daughter, Gena Phenix, a theme came to mind: groups of songs that best represented the different aspects of her work and life. Knowing how important family was in her life, I recorded three of her children’s songs [pictures of the Tenney girls are on the original published works], the song “Glück” dedicated to her husband, and “I Bring You Heartsease” dedicated to her mother. The opening group of songs is a collection of compositions from early to late in her career. Her two best-selling song cycles, Love in a Life and ,i>A Lute of Jade, are also included. Since Branscombe stayed true to her Canadian roots, often returning there for summer vacations and family visits, I chose two songs, “Dear Lad o’Mine” and “Blow Softly Maple Leaves,” written for the Canadian World War I and World War II efforts. We rounded out the recording by having my wonderful accompanist, Martin Hennessy, play four of her enchanting piano compositions.16
Shimeta was inspired to take Branscombe’s work to another level after seeing a one-woman show about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She created a 70-minute song recital with dramatic dialogue, called “Life, Love, Song!: A Visit with Gena Branscombe,” in an intense collaboration with actor, writer, and friend Evan Pappas. Norman Carlberg directed the show, which Shimeta gave for the first time in April 2004 with Elkins-Marlow and Roger Phenix, Branscombe’s grandson, in the audience. The premise of the show is that, while setting up for tea, Branscombe muses about how she will describe her career when she meets Elkins-Marlow for the first time.
“Bringing Gena Branscombe to life in an art song recital with dramatic dialogue has been truly rewarding,” said Shimeta. “To have as my inspiration a working female musician who strove to stay faithful to her musical ideals and committed to her love of family, and remembering she did this nearly 100 years ago, I believe Gena Branscombe helped lay the foundation for present-day women in music. And I want to do everything I can to promote that.”17
NOTE: The CD may be purchased from www.kathleenshimeta.com. To schedule performances of Miss Shimeta’s concert, “Life, Love, Song! A Visit with Gena Branscombe,” please contact Heike Bachmann of Spessard Management at heike@spessardmgmt.com. The concert is particularly suited for colleges and community concert series.
1. Victoria Etnier Villamil, A Singer’s Guide to the American Art Song, 1870-1980, Scarecrow Press: Lanham, MD and London, 1993.
2. Laurine Elkins-Marlow, “Gena Branscombe: American Composer and Conductor, A Study of Her Life and Works,” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Texas, 1980.
3. Gena Branscombe, “The Sound of Trumpets,” Music Clubs Magazine, Special 1962.
4. Laurine Elkins-Marlow, Liner notes for Kathleen Shimeta’s CD, “Ah! Love, I Shall Find Thee: Songs of Gena Branscombe” (Albany Records, 2003).
5. Arthur Farwell and W. Dermott Darby, ed., Music in America, 1915, pp. 438-89, vol.
4 in Daniel Gregory Mason, ed., The Art of Music: A Comprehensive Library of Information for Music Lovers and Musicians, New York: The National Society for Music, 14 vol.
6. Elkins-Marlow, Liner notes.
7. Branscombe, “The Sound of Trumpets.”
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Marion Morrey Richter, “Four-Score-and-Ten Birthday Observance Honors Gena Branscombe, Distinguished American Composer,” Music Clubs Magazine, Spring 1972.
12. Elkins-Marlow, Liner notes.
13. Ibid.
14. Branscombe, “The Sound of Trumpets.”
15. Susan E. Davis, interview with Kathleen Shimeta, July 2, 2005.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
Elkins-Marlow, Laurine. “Gena Branscombe: Her Final Years.” Music Clubs Magazine, Autumn 1977.
“National Federation of Music Clubs’ Sixteenth Biennial Convention.” Musical Courier, June 22, 1929.
Phenix, Gena Tenney. “Timeline of Gena Branscombe’s Life: 1881-1977.” An unpublished document, in Gena Branscombe’s papers, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
Shimeta, Kathleen, video of her song recital with dramatic dialogue, “Life, Love, Song!: A Visit with Gena Branscombe,” April 2004.
Susan E. Davis, the author of four nonfiction books, has written extensively about the creative process in the visual arts for the past 20 years in various magazines. A passionate devotee of opera and choral works, Davis has just completed a novel.