Mary, part 1

Note: this is the first post of a new series that I'll return to occasionally.

A couple of months ago, I was given a collection of sheet music. Not the archive, not me at work. Me, the feminist musicologist who's obsessed with turn of the 20th century ephemera. One of my mom's coworkers had been keeping her great-aunt's sheet music collection from the 1900-1920s; she heard of my research interests and thought I could use it. She graciously gave it to me in the hopes that I could use it for research, but I've found it's turned into something even more personal.

At estate sales/antique stores, I tend to buy up old pictures of anonymous women (anywhere up until the 1940s or so). I once found a scrapbook of a school teacher in rural Texas; it chronicles her journey from late high school to her first teaching gig. I'm planning on scanning the pages and putting them online-- showing the amazing life that has been forgotten.
I think that's why I keep obsessing over Etude women, clubwork, old pictures, and now Mary's sheet music. Mary died early in life-- she never married, never got to live a full life. She spent her days at the piano- playing this music, dreaming of an optimistic future in exotic places (more on that in future posts). If not for a distant relative keeping her keepsakes, she would be lost, forgotten. Maybe I make it overly personal... maybe it's my way of projecting... hoping that one day the small things I do/collect/make won't be forgotten.... that how I spend my days will be passed down and remembered. Regardless...

I want these women and what they did with their lives to be remembered. I want to highlight the [however mundane it might be] life that they led. I hate to think that women who weren't big names, who didn't win fame and fortune, are of lesser significance to their well-chronicled counterparts. (Of course I'm finding that even those who were somewhat well known are still forgotten to the "sands of time." Case in point: possible next research topic- one Dana Suesse, a Tin Pan Alley composer who wrote the music for the stage review for the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration. But that's yet again another story, another post.)

So Mary, you are not forgotten. Your sheet music helps to carry on your legacy, and I will chronicle it here. On this tiny, insignificant blog with the few readers who might accidentally read this.

Coming up: I'll look into the topics that Mary seemed to gravitate towards, and explore what little we know about her life. And then I'll get less musicological and draw conclusions about how this sheet music helps us define her identity (I feel like a fortune-teller, interpreting and reading my own story into these, but maybe there's some truth somewhere in it all).