The Century Club of California (CCC), founded in 1888, was San Francisco's most prestigious women's club in the early twentieth century. The club's aim was to promote intellectual growth and amplify female voices to help women enter the public domain with confidence. Weekly presentations featured renowned public figures and women who had achieved success in traditionally male fields. Rather than raising money for benevolent organizations, the CCC aimed to effect foundational social changes by informing women of the latest developments in all fields, thus empowering them to engage in political and social activism. Music played a critical role in furthering this ambitious goal; it had its own programming committee, which operated on an equal basis with those devoted to art, science, education, and current events. This article, based on the club's extensive collection of unpublished materials, looks at the CCC's first three decades, when the club promoted “the art of forceful speech” through modeling of successful women, providing opportunities for members to project their musical voices, elucidating new musical research, and supporting organizations such as the all-female Saturday Morning Orchestra. The CCC's activities underscore the significant role female musicians played in advancing the New Woman movement of the time.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, called “California's greatest woman” at her death in 1919, was very rich—and very philanthropic. Despite attending school in rural Missouri only a year or so past the eighth grade, Hearst directed her most influential benefactions toward education, particularly for women. She became a prime mover in the kindergarten movement and PTA, established women's scholarships at UC Berkeley, and was UC's first female regent.

This article, drawing on Hearst's extensive archive, describes music's role in her philanthropy. She supported individual artists and ensembles, staged elaborate musicales at her various homes, funded music performing spaces, patronized renowned singers and instrumentalists, provided musical performances for college students and the general public, and encouraged the formation of an opera school.

As a female patron championing women's education, Hearst was caught between the conservative ideology of male–female “spheres” and the New Woman movement of the early twentieth century. Her wealth allowed her to transcend old models; yet she was also conditioned by them, as shown in her attitudes toward women's suffrage and “proper” female behaviors. By bolstering the traditional view of women as the culture-bearers in U.S. society, Hearst's philanthropy functioned as both retrospective reinforcement and progressive idealism.

The eight-volume second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music is an extraordinary achievement, embodying the contributions of nearly 1500 scholars, many of whom regularly read and publish in the present journal. It was therefore with some trepidation, and a great deal of humility, that I accepted John Koegel's invitation to review the encyclopedia's coverage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century “art music.” The more I delved into this gargantuan task, the more impressed I became with the encyclopedia's scope, the high quality of writing, and the sensitivity to difficult conceptual issues in the field. (And as a side benefit, I learned about a host of people I'd not previously known.)

The practice of segregated union locals, common in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) during the first half of the twentieth century, led to racial confrontation in San Francisco. In 1934, black Local 648 sued its much larger counterpart, Local 6, which had attempted to control all musical employment in the Bay Area. Though Local 648 eventually withdrew its suit, its charter was revoked and black musicians were placed in “subsidiary” status. A new “colored local” (669) was chartered in 1946 and worked alongside Local 6 until the state forced amalgamation in 1960. Many other segregated locals did not merge until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The saga of Locals 6, 648, and 669 brings into focus the complex social and economic forces buffeting the working musician in the early twentieth century. Racialist attitudes in the US labor movement, mirrored in the musicians' union, forced blacks to organize separately and accept lower wages in order to secure employment. The AFM, for its part, was constrained by its dedication to local autonomy. Black union musicians were themselves divided—torn between outrage at their second-class status and the apparent benefits of working for change from within the organization.

Lou Harrison seems always to have been re-examining his older works, revising or updating them, reworking them into movements of longer compositions, or creating alternative versions. This article examines Harrison’s revisions, alterations, and self-borrowings in terms of both technique and aesthetic objectives. Harrison’s first reworking of a set of short pieces into an extended composition, the Suite for Symphonic Strings of 1960, resulted in a poly-stylistic work he found so attractive that he not only used the self-borrowing technique in later works (such as the Third Symphony) but also incorporated similar contrasts in most of his long works, whether or not they were based on recycled materials. Thus the process of revision and self-borrowing in itself helped Harrison develop a distinctive personal style – one marked by its own eclecticism.

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.