MARY CARR MOORE:
COMPOSER, TEACHER, FAR WESTERN ACTIVIST FOR AMERICAN MUSIC 1873-1957
By
Catherine Parsons Smith
Associate Professor of Music, University of Nevada, Reno
Mary
Carr Moore’s formal connection with Unitarianism
came through her mother, Sarah Pratt Carr, a minister
who in the 1890s organized several new Unitarian congregations
in the Fresno area of California’s Central Valley.
Mary Moore’s life was centered around music from
an early age. Although she was born in Memphis and passed
her early years in Louisville, by the age of ten she had
relocated with her family to the west coast, where she
remained, living successively in Napa, San Francisco (where
she received her formal training as a singer and composer),
rural Lemoore (CA), Seattle, San Francisco again, and
finally (from the mid-1920s) in Los Angeles.
Mary
Louise Carr at age 5, 1878
Moore
was initially trained as a singer, but soon turned toward
composition. While most American composers, especially
the women among them, primarily wrote songs and piano
pieces for their students, Moore concentrated on operas,
composing a total of eight over a period of more than
forty years. The first, really an operetta—composed
to her own libretto at the age of nineteen—was performed
by a group of young people in San Francisco; she sang
the lead role. After a pause of almost fifteen years,
in which she abandoned composition for a time in favor
of child rearing and teaching in Lemoore and then Seattle,
she set to work on her four-act grand opera based on the
story of the Whitman Massacre of 1847 at a time when survivors
of the massacre were still living and controversy still
swirled around both the missionaries and the murders.
The idea of using an opera to tell something approximating
recent regional history was a novel one. She commissioned
a libretto from her minister-suffragist-novelist mother.
Their determination to tell the story without superimposing
a romantic triangle and to represent Native American participants
as individuals made their project unique. Narcissa:
Or, The Cost of Empire, had its premier in Seattle
in 1912. Several of the principals were imported from
New York for the occasion, but no experienced conductor
was willing to risk conducting an opera by a woman composer;
therefore Moore herself became a conductor. (She conducted
revivals in San Francisco in 1925 and Los Angeles in 1945
as well.)
Her next major opera was David Rizzio, first performed
in Los Angeles in 1932. In Italian, this opera tells the
story of the murder of the Papal Nuncio to the court of
Mary Queen of Scots. The captivity and execution of Mary
Queen of Scots was a favorite 19th-century operatic subject,
but Moore chose to concentrate on the short section of
Mary’s life in which she actually governed. The opera
was revived in the late 1940s by the Los Angeles Opera
and Fine Arts Club; the audience filled the old Biltmore
Theater.
Mary
Carr Moore at age twenty-eight, at the time of the
second production of The Oracle, Seattle, 1902.
Moore
definitely preferred her operatic heroines to be actors
in their own lives rather than the sex objects and victims
so often found in Romantic opera. Of her other operas,
Los Rubios was composed over a three-month period
in 1931 and produced in the same year as part of the 150th
anniversary of the founding of Los Angeles. Legende
Provençale, in French, explores the question,
what would happen if the extravagant declarations of the
courtly love tradition were taken literally. (A ghost
story is part of the answer.) This opera was completed
in 1935. Alone among her major works, it was never produced.
It is written in a more modern style that was Narcissa
or Rizzio. Though one of its arias was performed
several times, she understood very well that it was too
difficult for the amateurs and students who had comprised
the ad hoc productions she had achieved for her earlier
operas.
After 1935, when she had already lived in Los Angeles
for a decade, teaching at California Christian College
and the Olga Steeb Piano School, Moore limited herself
to composing chamber music, short instrumental pieces
and songs. Her long career as an activist in support of
American composers and their music (begun in her Seattle
years) reached a climax in those years as she became a
part of the Advisory Committee to the local branch of
the Federal Music Project during the Great Depression.
In these years she helped organize the California Society
of Composers, which offered festivals of American music
in 1937 and 1938 and also pushed for performances of music
by local composers by the new FMP orchestras. The constructive
aspect of this work faded (and its successes shrank) as
the CSC took a nativist turn and reorganized as the Native
American Composers. These organizational efforts, along
with the Federal Music Project and other aspects of the
Depression-Era WPA, petered out soon after December 7,
1941, when the U.S. entered World War II. By that time
Moore was almost seventy. Though she was still going strong
as a teacher, her years of prodigious work had taken their
toll and she was no longer so productive. The years following
World War II saw the gradual decline of the lively music
club and amateur music-making culture that had sustained
her career for half a century.
Four
generations: Moore with daughter, granddaughter-in-law,
and great-grandchildren, Los Angeles 1952
Moore
was very much a Victorian lady—both encouraged and
thwarted by her culture—who managed to grow artistically
in spite of the obstacles she faced. Family financial
reverses prevented her from studying abroad, the usual
pattern for musicians of her day. Wage discrimination
kept her in low-paying teaching assignments, though she
was often a major contributor to her family’s income.
(In Los Angeles, for a time she supported her mother,
her divorced daughter and two young grandsons.) Most damaging,
given her tremendous energy and obvious gift for composition,
was the fact that she was barred by both gender and geography
from working in professional opera houses with professional
singers and musicians, where she might have found the
stimulation to develop her gifts even further. Yet she
made the most of the opportunities that came her way,
and left an important body of work that deserves more
exploration than it has received to date.
One hallmark of Mary Carr Moore’s teaching was her
ability to persuade even the most inhibited of her students
to compose freely. In the 1930s and 40s, their work was
often performed at a manuscript club, whose goal suggests
the breadth of Moore’s vision: “It has been
the wish of the founder, Mary Carr Moore, that, in this
club, the one tie would be that of the Universal Language,
MUSIC, and that all division of religion, politics, or
custom might be forgotten, and all work together in the
cause of HARMONY.”
