From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra by Maria Noriega Rachwal (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra by Maria Noriega Rachwal Corinne Cardinal From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra. By Maria Noriega Rachwal. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2015. 208 pp. From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, the symphony orchestra has been primarily composed of male musicians—a tendency that remained in place until the mid-twentieth century. Professional orchestras in North America and Europe did not hire women. Women were encouraged to study music but only with the objective of improving their marital prospects and climbing the social ladder. In addition, women could not learn just any instrument: social etiquette required women to study only those instruments that would enhance their femininity. The careers of women musicians were usually limited to singing or musical instruction for children. This domestic ideology put forth by bourgeois society sought to maintain the image of women as passive, submissive, and socially mute. What [End Page 108] made it so that women today can play wind instruments or percussion, and succeed as orchestral conductors? In From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall (2015), translated into French as Partition pour femmes et orchestra (2017), musicologist Maria Noriega Rachwal presents the work of the pioneering Ethel Stark, a visionary who worked to break down gendered barriers and open up new possibilities for women musicians. Through archival research and interviews with women musicians, Rachwal tells not only Ethel Stark’s story but also that of the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (MWSO), the first orchestra in Canada composed entirely of women. Maria Noriega Rachwal uses a range of primary sources to recount the tumultuous history of this atypical orchestra, including interviews and conversations with former members of the MWSO, such as Lyse Vésinat and Pearl Rosemarin Aronoff; recordings and photographs; and an unpublished memoir provided by Max Haupt, Ethel Stark’s nephew. Archival materials are drawn from the University of Calgary Library, Library and Archives Canada, the Jewish Public Library (Montreal), and the University of Toronto Library. The book is divided into eleven chapters, with the material presented chronologically, plus a prologue and a concluding note. The first chapter takes up Ethel Stark’s early years, exploring her family origins, social circle, and musical studies. Raised in a musical family in Montreal’s Jewish community, Stark studied violin from age nine with violinist Alfred De Sève and later with Saul Brant at the McGill Conservatory. Stark was not only the first woman admitted to the conducting program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but also one of the earliest Canadian women soloists to perform on American radio and the first woman to play under the baton of maestro Fritz Reiner—a conductor who, according to Rachwal, incarnated the image of the “conductor-dictator” (15). The second chapter presents a series of important events in Stark’s early career that led to the creation of the MWSO. In 1935 she left for New York, where her first professional engagements were with Phil Spitalny and his Hour of Charm orchestra, “one of the few paid professional ensembles in [New York] that accepted women musicians at the time, even though it showcased them as novelties (and sometimes as sexual objects) and not as the serious and educated professionals they were” (23). Stark soon tired of this work, however, and left to create an all-women ensemble, the New York Women’s Chamber Orchestra (NYWCO). With this ensemble, as with the MWSO, we see her frustration with the exclusion of women from all significant professional activities in music and her determination to do something to change the situation of women in the professional musical world. In 1940, during the Second World War, Stark worked alongside Montreal-based arts patron Madge Bowen to create the first symphony orchestra in Canada composed entirely of women. In chapters 3 and 4 Rachwal explains how these two visionaries overcame a host of challenges, including an insufficient number of available musicians and instruments, financial deficits, and the lack of a space large [End Page 109] enough to rehearse the entire orchestra. Following leads where they could, Stark...