Living between Worlds Ancient and Modern: The Musical Collaboration of Kathleen Schlesinger and Elsie Hamilton

Abstract

Musicology has recently re-evaluated the nature, form and purpose of musical biography, reflecting a broader ‘biographical turn’ in the humanities. This article takes up recent challenges to move beyond the traditional model of the ‘life and works’ of ‘great’ composers and joins the search for new paradigms of musical biography. The lives of the Australian microtonal composer Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965) and the British music archaeologist Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953), and their collaboration, which spanned three decades, are offered as a case study that demonstrates the importance of international and transnational networks for comparative musicology and modern music, and reveals the role of women as critical agents of scholarship and cultural transmission. It also lays bare the considerable influence exerted by the fin de siècle occult revival upon the search for new modalities of musical expression. It is an example of how a biographical approach allows an expansive examination of a mentalité and can bring together a range of discourses to reveal unrecognized connections and relationships.

Notes

I am grateful to Rachel Cowgill, Judith Crispin, Sophie Fuller, Penelope Gouk, Alistair Noble, Paul Pickering, Christopher Scheer and Paul Watt for their comments and suggestions.

¹Kathleen Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos: A Study of its Mechanism and of its Relation to the Modal System of Ancient Greek Music Followed by a Survey of the Greek Harmoniai in Survival or Rebirth in Folk Music (London, 1939). For details of Hamilton's sea journey see Hooper Brewster-Jones, ‘Tuning of Ancient Instruments: Elsie Hamilton's Unique Work’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 11 February 1937. An inventory of the writings and musical works of Schlesinger and Hamilton is provided in the Appendix to this article.

²Hamilton offers an account of her first meeting with Schlesinger and her impressions of Schlesinger's classes at the 1916 Summer School in the first chapter of her booklet The Modes of Ancient Greece. See Elsie Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece (1953), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-002.pdf> (accessed 22 September 2010). This booklet, written in 1953, the year of Schlesinger's death, was translated into German by Friedrich Doldinger as Die Skalen Altgriechenlands (Freiburg, 1957; repr. Heygendorf, 1994). The booklet is included among a valuable collection of articles by Schlesinger and Hamilton and several of Hamilton's manuscript scores collated by Brian Lee and made publicly available on his website, Naked Light (<http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/articles-00.htm>). The articles appear as reprints without page numbers, and the site carries a copyright disclaimer for the music manuscripts. For a more general account of the 1916 Summer School see Crispian Villeneuve, Rudolf Steiner in Britain: A Documentation of his Ten Visits, 2 vols. (Forest Row, 2004), i, 518–20. Other events included lectures by the leading theosophist C. Jinarajadasa on natural science and by the militant suffragette Charlotte Despard on Prometheus Unbound.

³See Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 2007).

⁴For an extended discussion of this issue from both points of view, see Roger Covell, Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne, 1967), 143; Geoffrey Serle, The Creative Spirit in Australia: A Cultural History (Melbourne, 1987), 79; Joel Crotty, ‘Interpreting Australian Music History: A Question of Time, Place and Attitudes’, Sounds Australian, 41 (1994), 6–7; Adrian Thomas, ‘The Climate of Change: The ABC as Patron of Australian Music during the Hopkins Era’, Australasian Music Research, 7 (2002), 47–54 (p. 47); Martin Buzacott, ‘Commission Impossible’, Limelight (June 2006), 20; Jon Rose, ‘Listening to History: Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Live Music’, Leonardo Music Journal, 18 (2008), 9–16 (<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/leonardo_music_journal/v018/18.rose.html>, accessed 14 August 2011); Kate Bowan, ‘Wild Men and Mystics: Rethinking Roy Agnew's Early Sydney Works’, Musicology Australia, 30 (2008), 1–28; and eadem, ‘“On a New Formula”: The Piano Miniatures of Hooper Brewster-Jones’, Context, 33 (2009), 25–43.

⁵See Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘Introduction’, Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, ed. Pekacz (Aldershot, 2006), 1–16 (p. 8). Pekacz's work is central to the re-evaluation of musical biography. See also eadem, ‘Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents’, Journal of Musicological Research, 23 (2004), 39–80.

⁶The work of several recent scholars, notably Alex Owen and Corinna Treitel, has done much to redefine the boundaries of the fin de siècle occult revival and identify its role in the shaping of cultural modernity. See Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, IL, and London, 2004), and Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, MD, 2004). On the relationship between the occult and music, see Bob van der Linden, ‘Music, Theosophical Spirituality and Empire: The British Modernist Composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds’, Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), 163–82; James Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality: Discourses of Place in the Work of John Foulds’, Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de siècle, ed. Grace Brockington (Berne, 2009), 49–78; idem, ‘Musical Modernity and Contested Commemoration at the Festival of Remembrance, 1923–1927’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 433–54; Music and Esotericism (Leiden, 2010), ed. Laurence Wuidar, esp. Part 2; and Rachel Cowgill, ‘Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7’, First World War Studies, 2 (2011), 75–107 (pp. 85ff.).

⁷Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden Lives’ (Oxford, 2010), 7.

⁸In Kessler-Harris's hands the individual ‘turns into a fact’ and becomes a way of illuminating the past, helping us ‘to see not only into particular events but into the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time’. See Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Why Biography?’, American Historical Review, 114 (2009), 625–30 (p. 626).

⁹Lois W. Banner, ‘Biography as History’, American Historical Review, 114 (2009), 579–86 (p. 583).

¹⁰Paul Pickering, in his work on the British World, has suggested biography as a useful lens through which to consider transnational history, and recent publications show that transnational biography itself has emerged as a distinct genre within the field of transnational history. See Paul Pickering, ‘An Afterthought: Why We Should Tell Stories of the British World’, Humanities Research, 13 (2006), 85–90, and Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (Basingstoke and New York, 2010).

¹¹Banner, ‘Biography as History’, 583.

¹²For culture and internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, see Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de siècle, ed. Brockington. The global reach and internationalist agenda of theosophy have been discussed by Peter Staudenmeier, Van der Linden and James Mansell, among others. See Peter Staudenmeier, ‘Occultism, Race and Politics in German-Speaking Europe, 1880–1940: A Survey of the Historical Literature’, European History Quarterly, 39 (2009), 47–70 (p. 55); Van der Linden, ‘Music, Theosophical Spirituality and Empire’, 163; and Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’, 60.

¹³The notion of the occult revival as an alternative narrative is borrowed from Mansell. See his ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’, 49.

¹⁴See particularly Owen, The Place of Enchantment, and Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, American Historical Review, 3 (2006), 692–716.

¹⁵For historical overviews of the Theosophical Society, see Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley, CA, 1980), and Michael Gomes, The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement (Wheaton, IL, 1987).

¹⁶Henry Olcott, Theosophy, Religion and Occult Science (London, 1885), 32–3; Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 85.

¹⁷Olcott, Theosophy, Religion and Occult Science, 33.

¹⁸Rudolf Steiner, Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (Berlin, 1886); idem, Goethes Weltanschauung (Weimar, 1897).

¹⁹For Steiner, see Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 97–101, and John Covach, ‘Schoenberg and the Occult: Some Reflections on the “Musical Idea”’, <http://www.ibiblio.org/johncovach/asoccult.htm> (accessed 26 May 2011).

²⁰See Joscelyn Godwin, Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Source Book (New York, 1986), 251; Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 100.

²¹Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 50.

²²See Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 176.

²³Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture I, 3 December 1906, Cologne, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19061203p02.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

²⁴Transcripts of these lectures can be found in the online Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/index.php?ga=GA0283> (accessed 23 June 2010). Steiner's lectures on music were collected and published in a single volume in 1925, the year of his death. See Marna Pease and Rudolf Steiner, Music in the Light of Anthroposophy (Dornach, 1925).

²⁵See Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 36.

²⁶Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture I.

²⁷ Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture I.

²⁸Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture V, 7 March 1923, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19230307p01.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

²⁹See Staudenmeier, ‘Occultism, Race and Politics’, 55.

³⁰See for example Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 24–6; Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’, 24; and Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 85–6.

³¹Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 86; Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 19.

³²Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD, 2001); Owen, The Place of Enchantment, esp. Chapters 2 and 5.

³³For the influence of the occult and Eastern religion on Holst, see Raymond Head, ‘Holst: Astrology and Modernism in “The Planets”’, Tempo, 187 (1993), 15–24, and Christopher M. Scheer, ‘“A Direct and Intimate Realization”: Holst and Formalism in the 1920s’, British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham, 2010), 109–24. Cyril Scott wrote prolifically on the occult and the arts. Of particular relevance to this subject is his book Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages (London, 1934), which traces a close connection between music and esoteric religion. For Peter Warlock, see Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford, 1994). For Foulds, see Malcolm MacDonald, John Foulds: His Life in Music (Rickmansworth, 1975).

³⁴Van der Linden, ‘Music, Theosophical Spirituality and Empire’; Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’; idem, ‘Musical Modernity and Contested Commemoration’; Cowgill, ‘Canonizing Remembrance’.

³⁵For details of Maud MacCarthy and Indian music, see Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’, 60.

³⁶Covach, ‘Schoenberg and the Occult’.

³⁷See Gauri Viswanathan, ‘The Ordinary Business of Occultism’, Critical Inquiry, 27 (2000), 1–20 (p. 1).

³⁸See Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 8.

³⁹Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 54. Viswanathan also has observed that theosophists were ‘looking for new forms of religion not founded on faith alone that would also be amenable to the tools and techniques of science’. See Viswanathan, ‘The Ordinary Business of Occultism’, 6.

⁴⁰Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (New York, 1877, repr. Los Angeles, CA, 1977); eadem, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (London, 1895).

⁴¹Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 3 (italics original).

⁴²Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 14.

⁴³Sixten Ringbom, ‘Art in “The Epoch of the Great Spiritual”: Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966), 386–418 (p. 390).

⁴⁴Mansell, ‘Music and the Borders of Rationality’, 56.

⁴⁵Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 8.

⁴⁶ Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 5.

⁴⁷Siv Ellen Kraft, ‘“To Mix or Not to Mix”: Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism in the History of Theosophy’, Numen International Review for the History of Religions, 49 (2002), 142–77 (p. 152).

⁴⁸Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. with notes by A. J. Ellis (London, 1875). For the history of comparative musicology, see Ethnomusicology and Music History, ed. Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman (Urbana, IL, 1991), and Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago, IL, 1991); see also Curt Sachs and Jaap Kunst, The Wellsprings of Music (The Hague, 1962).

⁴⁹Alexander J. Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 33 (1885), 485–527.

⁵⁰Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘The Basis of Indian Music’, Musical Times, 56 (1915), 335–9 (p. 335).

⁵¹Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, viii.

⁵²Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 36.

⁵³Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘The Significance of Musical Instruments in the Evolution of Music’, The Oxford History of Music: Introductory Volume, ed. Percy Carter Buck (London, 1929), 85–116 (p. 87; my italics).

⁵⁴Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, vii.

⁵⁵Schlesinger was not alone in her interest in the undertone series. It also assumed a place in the work of the better-known theorist Hugo Riemann. Riemann was interested in establishing a kind of harmonic dualism in which the minor triad could be understood by the same acoustical principles as the major. Because the major triad could be extracted from the overtone series, Riemann theorized that the minor triad could likewise be generated from the undertone series. For a recent study of Riemann's theoretical work, see Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (Cambridge, 2003). Joscelyn Godwin, a prolific writer on music and the occult, also discusses the subharmonic series, but concedes that it is a symbolic concept belonging to the realm of the speculative rather than the actual. See Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (London, 1987), 125–7, 188–9.

⁵⁶Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, vii.

⁵⁷James Mountford, ‘Kathleen Schlesinger: Tribute to a Scholar’, Musical Times, 95 (1954), 200–1 (p. 201).

⁵⁸Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 2.

⁶¹Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 3.

⁵⁹ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 293–4.

⁶⁰Stringed instruments, given that their tuning was determined by string tension which did not survive the passage of time, could not help her to prove the existence of the harmoniai. She nonetheless relied heavily upon the monochord in her work, even admitting that her initial ideas came through experimentation on the psaltery, and went on to reconstruct many kitharas and lyres. See Schlesinger, ‘The Significance of Musical Instruments’, 97.

⁶² Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 37.

⁶³Schlesinger, ‘The Significance of Musical Instruments’, 94.

⁶⁴ Schlesinger, ‘The Significance of Musical Instruments’, 91; see also Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 36.

⁶⁵Schlesinger, ‘The Significance of Musical Instruments’, 93; and see eadem, The Greek Aulos, Chapter 10: ‘Records of Measurements and Performance’ (pp. 408–518).

⁶⁶Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 11–12.

⁶⁷ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 1.

⁶⁸ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, viii.

⁶⁹ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, viii. For Victorian women, Hellenism and the translation of ancient Greek texts, see Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, IL, 1999), 43–82, and Yopie Prins, Ladies’ Greek: Translations of Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 2011).

⁷⁰Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 2.

⁷¹Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece, Chapter 1.

⁷² Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece, Chapter 1.

⁷³Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture II, 12 November 1906, Berlin, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19061112p01.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

⁷⁴Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture VI, 8 March 1923, Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19230308p01.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

⁷⁵ Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture VI, 8 March 1923, Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19230308p01.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

⁷⁶ Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone’, Lecture VI, 8 March 1923, Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner Archive, <http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/GA0283/19230308p01.html> (accessed 11 October 2010).

⁷⁷Schlesinger, ‘The Basis of Indian Music’, 338; see also eadem, ‘The Music of the Ancients (Résumé of Four Lectures Delivered at the British Museum)’, Musical Times, 55 (1914), 95–7 (p. 96).

⁷⁸For detailed studies of late nineteenth-century thinking on musical origins, see Alexander Rehding, ‘The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53 (2000), 345–85, and Eric Ames, ‘The Sound of Evolution’, Modernism/Modernity, 10 (2003), 297–325.

⁷⁹Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘Report of the Fellow in the Archaeology of Music for the Year 1930–1931’, Annual Report 1930–1931 and Prospectus 1931–1932 of the Institute of Archaeology (Liverpool, 1931), 13–14 (p. 13). The Institute of Archaeology Annual Reports and Prospectuses are located in the Special Collections and Archives, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, [SPEC] R/LF379.5.A1.U55. I am grateful to archivist Roy Lumb for his assistance with this material. Hereafter they are abbreviated as I of A Annual Report followed by year span and page numbers.

⁸⁰The previous title was more general: The Modes of ancient Greek Music and their Notation Re-Considered in the Light of New Discoveries; see I of A Annual Report (1920–1), 15–16.

⁸¹For an extended discussion of the temporal fallacy in relation to members of the Berlin School, see Ames, ‘The Sound of Evolution’, 316–17.

⁸²Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 86.

⁸³Henrika Kuklik, ‘The Rise and Fall – and Potential Resurgence – of the Comparative Method, with Special Reference to Anthropology’, Humanities Research, 14 (2007), 51–66 (p. 53).

⁸⁴Erich von Hornbostel, ‘Die Erhaltung ungeschriebener Musik (1911)’, Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, ed. Arthur Simon, trans. Rose Riggs (Berlin, 2002), 93, quoted in Ames, ‘The Sound of Evolution’, 317.

⁸⁵Schlesinger, ‘The Basis of Indian Music’, 338.

⁸⁶H. G., ‘“The Greek Aulos.” By Kathleen Schlesinger’, Musical Times, 80 (1939), 360–2 (pp. 360, 362).

⁸⁷Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944, 2 vols. (London, 1947), ii, 765.

⁸⁸See 1881 England and Wales Census, Islington, 55; 1891 England and Wales Census, Islington, 22; 1901 England and Wales Census, Wembley, 1; 1911 England and Wales Census, Tufnell Park, 401.

⁸⁹Mountford, ‘Kathleen Schlesinger’, 200.

⁹⁰See Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 50, 59.

⁹¹Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey (Glasgow and Cambridge, 1887). Jebb is also given as the primary author of Homer: Eine Entführung in die Ilias und Odyssee […] Autorisierte Übersetzung nach der dritten Auflage des Originals von E. Schlesinger (Berlin, 1893).

⁹²Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xi.

⁹³The IMS was the precursor to the International Musicological Society founded in 1927. The IMS Congress was by no means the only major international event Paris was to hold in that year; others included the Paris Universal Exhibition, the International Colonial Congress and the International Socialist Congress, not to mention the Olympic Games.

⁹⁴Mahillon's system of instrument classification provided a basis for the subsequent Sachs–Hornbostel method. Hornbostel and Sachs's system of instrument classification first appeared in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie; see Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 46 (1914), 553–90.

⁹⁵Jann Pasler, ‘The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004), 24–76 (p. 75).

⁹⁶Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘Researches into the Origin of the Organs of the Ancients’, Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 2 (1901), 167–202; eadem, Modern Orchestral Instruments and Early Records of the Precursors of the Violin Family (London, 1910), v.

⁹⁷Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women (London, 1985), 16.

⁹⁸Typescript report by Professor Garstang on the Archaeology of Music (recommending the appointment of Miss K. Schlesinger as Fellow in the Archaeology of Music) [1914], Minute Book, S149, Special Collections and Archives, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool.

⁹⁹‘News in Brief’, The Times, 12 December 1914. The Fellowship in the Archaeology of Music is even more remarkable when considered against the fact that the University of Liverpool's first lectureship in music was not created until 1919, five years later.

¹⁰⁰Kathleen Schlesinger, A Bibliography of Musical Instruments and Archaeology, Intended as a Guide to the Study of Musical Instruments (London, 1912).

¹⁰¹ I of A Annual Report (1923–4), 13–15 (pp. 14–15). I have, however, found no evidence of the publication of this series to date.

¹⁰²See, for example, Schlesinger, ‘The Music of the Ancients’; ‘Review of Books: The Music and Musical Instruments of the Bible’, Musical Times, 55 (1914), 375–9; ‘The Basis of Indian Music’; ‘The Origin of the Major and Minor Modes’, Musical Times, 58 (1917), 297–301, 352–5, 452–7; ‘Review of Books: Marimba-Musik by Siegfried Nadel’, Music and Letters, 12 (1931), 421; ‘Further Notes on Aristoxenus and Musical Intervals’, Classical Quarterly, 27 (1933), 88–96; and ‘Review: Helen H. Roberts's Form in Primitive Music’, Man, 36 (1936), 165–6. Mention of other publications and contributions to journals are scattered throughout her annual reports to the Institute of Archaeology.

¹⁰³See Minutes of the British Museum Standing Committee, 12 July 1913, 3119, and 11 July 1914, 3267, Museum Archive, British Museum, London. See also ‘Miss Schlesinger's Lectures’, The Times, 28 October 1913, and ‘The Music of the Ancients’, The Times, 22 November 1913.

¹⁰⁴Mountford, ‘Kathleen Schlesinger’, 200.

¹⁰⁵Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 310, n. 2.

¹⁰⁶Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales’, 526, quoted in John Blacking, A Commonsense View of All Music: Reflections on Percy Grainger's Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education (Cambridge and Melbourne, 1987), 14; Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 310.

¹⁰⁷ I of A Annual Report (1924–5), 13–16 (p. 15).

¹⁰⁸See Erich von Hornbostel, ‘Kann die “Blasquintentheorie” zur Erklärung exotischer Tonsysteme beitragen?’, Anthropos, 3/4 (1937), 402–18, and Helen Myers, Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (New York, 1992), 107–8.

¹⁰⁹ I of A Annual Report (1924–5), 14–17 (p. 15).

¹¹⁰See Jaap Kunst, Around von Hornbostel's Theory of the Cycle of Blown Fifths (Amsterdam, 1948); idem, Ethnomusicology: A Study of its Nature, its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities (The Hague, 1974); and Jaap Kunst: Correspondence, 1920–1940: An Annotated Index, ed. Loekie M. van Proosdij and Marjolijn J. van Roon (Amsterdam, 1992).

¹¹¹Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘Correspondence’, Music and Letters, 19 (1938), 491–2 (p. 491).

¹¹⁴Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xii.

¹¹²See Kathleen Schlesinger, Is European Musical Theory Indebted to the Arabs? Reply to ‘The Arabian Influence on Musical Theory’ by H. G. Farmer (London, 1925); eadem, ‘The Greek Foundations of the Theory of Music’, Musical Standard, 27 (1926); Henry G. Farmer, Historical Facts for the Arabian Musical Influence (London, [n.d.]).

¹¹³See Arthur T. Froggatt, ‘Correspondence: The Origin of the Major and Minor Modes’, Musical Times, 58 (1917), 452–3, and Arthur Henry Fox Strangways, ‘Correspondence: The Origin of the Major and Minor Modes’, Musical Times, 58 (1917), 455–6. Riemann was also derided for his theories based on the undertone series. See Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought, 17, 32.

¹¹⁵See Angela Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 5–7.

¹¹⁶Details of the friendship between Elsie Hamilton and Bessie Davidson can be found in Penelope Little's biography of Davidson. See Penelope Little, A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris (Melbourne, 2003). Stella Bowen and Bessie Davidson are well-recognized early twentieth-century Australian painters. For Bowen, see Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life: A Memoir (Sydney, 1999), and Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky's Lunch (New York, 2000).

¹¹⁷Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne, 1996), 23.

¹¹⁸Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London, 13.

¹¹⁹For an account of occult activity in Berlin at the turn of the century, see Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 50–7. For details of Hamilton's early life in Australia and New Zealand, see William Sanders, Scrapbook (1888–1908), PRG 45, State Library of South Australia; ‘Personal’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 7 August 1903 and 11 April 1904; ‘Miss Elsie Hamilton's Recital’, ibid., 29 July 1904; ‘Town Hall Concert’, ibid., 10 May 1905; ‘The Social Sphere’, Observer (Auckland, NZ), 13 March 1909; ‘The Social Sphere’, ibid., 17 July 1909; ‘Personal’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 19 June 1911; and ‘Miss Elsie Hamilton’, The Mail (Adelaide), 11 April 1914.

¹²⁰Amélie André-Gédalge was active in the Theosophical Society and published articles in theosophical journals on music and theosophy. See Amélie André-Gédalge, ‘Application de quelques enseignements théosophiques à l'art du chant’, Transactions of the Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, 1 (1904), 359–62; eadem, ‘Essai sur le pouvoir éducateur de la musique’, ibid., 2 (1905), 375–82; and eadem, ‘La flûte enchantée’, ibid., 3 (1906), 343–8.

¹²¹Schlesinger, ‘The Origin of the Major and Minor Modes’, 355.

¹²²See Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘The Return of the Planetary Modes’, Anthroposophy, 2 (1923), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-005.pdf> (accessed 23 July 2010), and Elsie Hamilton, ‘The Nature of Musical Experience in the Light of Anthroposophy’, Anthroposophy, 1 (1920–2), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-006.pdf> (accessed 23 July 2010).

¹²³Hamilton recalled listening to the hum of an aeroplane that flew over her Parisian studio each day, which produced ‘the most beautiful harmonics from a deep fundamental tone of F’. See Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece, Chapter 1.

¹²⁴There is a significant body of literature dealing with female collaborations, particularly in the field of literature. See inter alia Bette London, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, NY, 1999), and Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Constructions of Authorship (Madison, WI, 2006).

¹²⁵For a detailed and nuanced account of such women, see Sophie Fuller, ‘Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-siècle Britain’, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana, IL, 2002), 79–101.

¹²⁶ For a detailed and nuanced account of such women, see Sophie Fuller, ‘Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-siècle Britain’, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana, IL, 2002), 95.

¹²⁷Schlesinger, ‘The Origin of the Major and Minor Modes’, 355.

¹²⁸Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 237; Mansell, ‘Musical Modernity and Contested Commemoration’, 435.

¹³⁰Schlesinger, ‘The Return of the Planetary Modes’.

¹²⁹Schlesinger, ‘The Return of the Planetary Modes’; see also eadem, ‘The Language of Music’, Anthroposophy, 1 (1920–2), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-004.pdf> (accessed 23 July 2010), and Hamilton, ‘The Nature of Musical Experience in the Light of Anthroposophy’.

¹³¹See, for example, the study Exercise in the Saturn Scale for three lyres; Hymn to Ra (incidental music for the play Sensa), which is composed in Sun scale 22, Venus species 12; and Ecce Homo, for voice and three lyres with words by Steiner (<http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/Articles-00.htm>), which is in the Venus scale. For a more recent speculative formulation of ‘planet-scales’ see Godwin's discussion of the music of the spheres (Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, 124–93).

¹³²Hamilton, ‘The Nature of Musical Experience in the Light of Anthroposophy’.

¹³³Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece.

¹³⁴ Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece.

¹³⁵‘The Music of the Ancients’, The Times, 22 November 1913, 10; ‘Miss Schlesinger and “Natural Intonation”: A Demonstration’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 25.

¹³⁶Van der Linden, ‘Music, Theosophical Spirituality and Empire’, 64; Cowgill, ‘Canonizing Remembrance’, 89–97. Cowgill (p. 92) observes that the concern of the Anglican Church over the popularity of esoteric spirituality was such that it set up a Committee on Spiritualism, Christian Science and Theosophy in 1919–20 to ‘investigate its appeal’.

¹³⁷Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 541–5.

¹³⁸‘Miss Schlesinger and “Natural Intonation”’, 25.

¹³⁹ ‘Miss Schlesinger and “Natural Intonation”’, 25.

¹⁴⁰ I of A Annual Report (1915–19), 12–13. A transcription of the libretto for Sensa is available at <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-026.pdf>. No bibliographical details are given with the transcription. The libretto itself is, however, derived from Collins's earlier work published by the Theosophical Society; see Mabel Collins, The Story of Sensa: An Interpretation of the Idyll of the White Lotus etc. (London, 1913).

¹⁴¹ I of A Annual Report (1922–3), 14. A full programme for this performance, with synopsis, is held in the archives at the Steiner Library in London. See box labelled ‘Performing Arts: Eurhythmy, Eurhythmy Theatre, Speech, Music’, Library of the Anthroposophical Society.

¹⁴²‘The Sitter Out’, Dancing Times, January 1929, 514, quoted in Katherine Sorley Walker, ‘The Festival and the Abbey: Ninette de Valois’ Early Choreography, 1925–1934’, Dance Chronicle, 7 (1984–5), 379–412 (pp. 402–4).

¹⁴³As seen in the above example, Hamilton chose to work within the prevailing notational system. Judging that the players had ‘quite enough to master in learning the unusual intervals of the Modes’, she chose to use ‘the ordinary notes of our modern scale which approximate most nearly to those of the Modes though they never coincide exactly with them’. See Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece. The microtonal theorist John Chalmers discusses Hamilton's harmonic system in some detail; see his A Prolegomenon to the Construction of Musical Scales (Lebanon, NH, 1993), Chapter 8: ‘Schlesinger's Harmoniai, Wilson's Diaphonic Cycles and Other Similar Constructs’, 139–60 (pp. 146–8), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-025a.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2010).

¹⁴⁴ As seen in the above example, Hamilton chose to work within the prevailing notational system. Judging that the players had ‘quite enough to master in learning the unusual intervals of the Modes’, she chose to use ‘the ordinary notes of our modern scale which approximate most nearly to those of the Modes though they never coincide exactly with them’. See Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece. The microtonal theorist John Chalmers discusses Hamilton's harmonic system in some detail; see his A Prolegomenon to the Construction of Musical Scales (Lebanon, NH, 1993), Chapter 8: ‘Schlesinger's Harmoniai, Wilson's Diaphonic Cycles and Other Similar Constructs’, 139–60 (pp. 146–8), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-025a.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2010), 146.

¹⁴⁵Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece.

¹⁴⁶Edward J. Dent, diary entry, 1 July 1919, EJD/3/1/15, The Papers of Edward Joseph Dent, GBR/0272/PP/EJD, King's College Archive Centre, University of Cambridge.

¹⁴⁷In The Modes of Ancient Greece, Chapter 4: ‘The Seven Great Planetary Modes’, Hamilton lists the modes (harmoniai) as follows: Dorian (Sun Scale); Phrygian (Venus); Lydian (Mercury); Mixolydian (Moon); Hypolydian (Mars); Hypophrygian (Jupiter); Hypodorian (Saturn). She then goes on to spell each individual mode.

¹⁴⁸For Ptolemy's tonoi, see Thomas J. Mathiesen et al., ‘Greece’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (accessed 19 December 2011).

¹⁴⁹For Schlesinger on Ptolemy's tonoi, see The Greek Aulos, xxx and 159–67; for Schlesinger on A. H. Fox Strangways and the Malkos raga, see ibid., 8.

¹⁵⁰Arthur Henry Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (Oxford, 1914).

¹⁵¹Hamilton, The Modes of Ancient Greece.

¹⁵²See, respectively, Mansell, ‘Musical Modernity and Contested Commemoration’, 442, 454, and Fiona Fraser, ‘Phyllis Campbell and the Sounds of Colour’, Literature and Aesthetics, 21 (2011), 213–35 (pp. 225–34). The ‘ultramodern’ American Dane Rudhyar is another composer whose music and philosophical outlook has much in common with these composers. Carol Oja has explored Rudhyar's musical language in relation to his esoteric thought; see her ‘Dane Rudhyar's Vision of American Dissonance’, American Music, 17 (1999), 129–45.

¹⁵³Her personal wealth was particularly useful; several references to the freedom afforded Hamilton by her family money appear in Schlesinger's writings, suggesting perhaps that her own personal means were not so great. See Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 542.

¹⁵⁴References to Schlesinger's travel are in the annual reports to the Institute of Archaeology between 1919 and 1930.

¹⁵⁵ I of A Annual Report (1926–7), 12–13 (p. 12).

¹⁵⁶Robert Mond was a wealthy Liverpool industrialist, a keen amateur archaeologist and a key benefactor of the Institute of Archaeology.

¹⁵⁷ I of A Annual Report (1913–14), 14.

¹⁵⁸Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xii. See also I of A Annual Report (1919–20), 13–14 (p. 14).

¹⁵⁹ I of A Annual Report (1934–5), 13–16 (p. 14).

¹⁶⁰ I of A Annual Report (1922–3), 14.

¹⁶¹Elizabeth Ayres not only assisted Schlesinger in the making of two facsimiles of Javanese flutes but also later reviewed The Greek Aulos for Classical Philology. See Elizabeth Ayres Kidd, ‘Review: The Greek Aulos’, Classical Philology, 35 (1940), 329–31.

¹⁶²Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xiii–xiv.

¹⁶³Jane Rendall, ‘Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925)’, Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London, 1989), 136–70 (p. 163).

¹⁶⁴ I of A Annual Report (1924–5), 13–16 (p. 14).

¹⁶⁸ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xii.

¹⁶⁵ I of A Annual Report (1926–7), 12–13 (p. 13).

¹⁶⁶Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xii.

¹⁶⁷ Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, xii.

¹⁶⁹Bruno Nettl, ‘Colonialism’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (accessed 20 August 2010).

¹⁷⁰In her work on colonial women, Woollacott has looked for ways in which imperial connections reveal how colonialism has helped to shape modernity. See Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London, 10.

¹⁷¹Vicinus, Independent Women, 12.

¹⁷²See ‘Sixth Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1917–18), Box 1, Society of Women Musicians (hereafter SWM) Archive, Royal College of Music, London, GB 1249. For a discussion of the SWM's formation, see Sophie Fuller, ‘Women Composers During the British Musical Renaissance, 1880–1918’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College, University of London, 1998), 78–80.

¹⁷³‘Third Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1913–14), Box 1, SWM Archive.

¹⁷⁴ ‘Third Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1913–14), Box 1, SWM Archive.

¹⁷⁵‘Eleventh Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1922–3), Box 1, SWM Archive.

¹⁷⁶Typewritten report, Bound Volume 3 BV003 (Green) Newspaper clippings, SWM Archive.

¹⁷⁷‘Sixth Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1917–18).

¹⁷⁸Elsie Hamilton, ‘Miss Kathleen Schlesinger and her Recent Discoveries’, The Music Student, 9 (1918), 348. This article was part of special issue devoted to ‘Women's Work in Music’, Box 4, SWM Archive.

¹⁷⁹Hamilton performed a piano reduction of her symphonic poem Mer montante, and the Scherzo from her Symphony in C minor was chosen to represent British composition in a concert at the Coliseum. See ‘Eighth Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1919–20), Box 1, SWM Archive.

¹⁸⁰Ledger book, ‘S.W.M. Members Elected & Resigned from 1920 to 1960’, SWM Archive.

¹⁸¹Dixon, Divine Feminine, 5–10; Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 24. See also Treitel's discussion of the participation of bourgeois women in the occult: Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 64–5.

¹⁸²‘Fifteenth Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians’ (1926–7), Box 1, SWM Archive; Lecture log book, SWM Archive. The composer and co-founder of the SWM, Katharine Eggar, was undoubtedly sympathetic to Schlesinger and Hamilton's work, as she herself worked directly with Maud MacCarthy towards the formation of a Theosophical School of Music. See ‘Theosophical School of Music Prospectus’, MCF 5/3/1/9 (12), The Papers of Maud MacCarthy, Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York. I am grateful to Christopher Scheer for this information.

¹⁸³Letter from Gertrude Eaton to Katharine Eggar, 29 October 1920, Box 4, SWM Archive.

¹⁸⁴Jacques Handschin, ‘Ludicia de novis libris: Kathleen Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos’, Acta musicologica, 20 (1948), 60–2; Otto Kinkeldy, ‘A New Theory of Greek Scales (Harmoniai)’, Bulletin of the American Musicological Society, 8 (1945), 8–9; F. W. G. [Francis William Galpin], ‘Reviews of Books: The Greek Aulos’, Music and Letters, 20 (1939), 325–6; L. S. Lloyd, ‘The Myth of Equal-Stepped Scales in Primitive Music’, Music and Letters, 27 (1946), 73–9; R. P. Winnington-Ingram, ‘Notices of Books: The Greek Aulos’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 59 (1939), 305–7.

¹⁸⁵For tensions between science and the occult, see Thomas Laqueur, ‘Why the Margins Matter: Occultism and the Making of Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), 111–35 (pp. 114–17).

¹⁸⁶Even as late 1992, Martin Litchfield West described the book as ‘massive and terrifying’, and, like many of his predecessors, took particular issue with her assertion about equidistant fingerholes. See Martin Litchfield West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 96.

¹⁸⁷This is one of many articles written by Tovey for the 1944 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that were later collected and published in a single volume; see Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (New York, 1967), 105–6.

¹⁸⁸Hamilton made her dissatisfaction with the limitations of the tempered system explicit when she argued that it did not offer ‘the same artistic and imaginative scope in harmonic and melodic possibilities as does the musical natural law, the Harmonic Series’. See Ethel Cooper, ‘An Adventure in Musical Composition’, A Book of South Australia: Women in the First Hundred Years, ed. Louise Brown (Adelaide, 1936), 235–6 (p. 235).

¹⁸⁹John Chalmers, ‘Radical Reworkings: Oedipus and Revelation in the Courthouse Park: Harry Partch's Two Music-Dramas on Classical Greek Themes’, Didaskalia, 3 (1996), <http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol3no1/chalmers.html> (accessed 27 August 2010).

¹⁹⁰Chalmers, ‘Schlesinger's Harmoniai, Wilson's Diaphonic Cycles and Other Similar Constructs’, 139. Others who have interested themselves in the work of Schlesinger include scholars of ancient Greek music such as Martin Litchfield West, and those interested in esoteric spirituality, in particular anthroposophy, such as Brian Lee and the Melbourne-based anthroposophist Gotthart Killian, who published Die Monochordschule des Pythagoras und das Musikalisch-Organische: Die Wiederentdeckung der alt-griechischen Planetenskalen durch Kathleen Schlesinger und die Erweiterung der Tonkunst (Melbourne, 2006).

¹⁹¹Brian McLaren, ‘Why is Harry Partch Important?’, <http://sonic-arts.org/mclaren/partch/important.htm> (accessed 15 September 2010).

¹⁹²Harry Partch, Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos (Urbana, IL, 1991), 169–70. Utilizing the orange box was a desperate but necessary measure as wood was ‘practically unobtainable’ during the First World War. Partch includes a drawing of the instrument in his account.

¹⁹³ Harry Partch, Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos (Urbana, IL, 1991), 32.

¹⁹⁴Important sources for details of her later life are three personal interviews conducted in Australia by fellow Adelaide composer Hooper Brewster-Jones, who was deeply influenced by her work on the harmonic series; her old friend, Ethel Cooper, who takes her place in that circle of independent, artistic Adelaide women; and Thea Stanley Hughes, a committed educationalist with similar spiritual inclinations. See Brewster-Jones, ‘Tuning of Ancient Instruments’; Cooper, ‘An Adventure in Musical Composition’, 235–6; and Thea Stanley Hughes, ‘“The New Language of Music”: Interesting Pianist-Composer’, Movement (June 1948), <http://www.nakedlight.co.uk/pdf/articles/a-003.pdf> (accessed 21 July 2010). Schlesinger's work on natural intonation was also covered in detail in Melbourne's Australasian. See ‘Music Notes’, Australasian, 23 March 1918, 527.

¹⁹⁵Stanley Hughes, ‘“The New Language of Music”’.

¹⁹⁶Brewster-Jones, ‘Tuning of Ancient Instruments’.

¹⁹⁷See Banner, ‘Biography as History’, 580, 585.