Introduction

Minna Lederman was born in 1896 and died in New York in 1995. Her parents were German-speaking Jewish immigrants who became prosperous. She studied music, dance, and drama—graduating from Barnard College in 1919—and worked as a journalist. She married Mell Daniel, a painter of the Syncronist school who eventually went into business and returned to painting in retirement.

Lederman became the publicist for the International Composers’ Guild and in 1923 helped to form the League of Composers and to launch its journal, which became known as Modern Music. With remarkable generosity she edited the journal on a voluntary basis from 1924 to 1946. In its pages she presented American and some European composers, writing about the latest developments in serious music at a time when there was very little discussion of this kind elsewhere. When the journal ceased publication, Virgil Thomson wrote: “My own debt to her is enormous. Her magazine was a forum for all the most distinguished world figures of creation and of criticism; and the unknown bright young were given their right to speak up among these, trained to do so without stammering and without fear.” In 2005 Wilfrid Mellers recalled, “I’d hazard that it was the liveliest and bestwritten music magazine ever issued.”

In 1992 Cage remembered his debt as a contributor:

In 1983 Lederman chronicled her editorial experience in an anthology and recognized that the eighty-nine issues of Modern Music had admirably fulfilled their purpose. She also recorded her impressions of Cage on the occasion of his seventieth birthday: “I believe that his impact on our time … has been wide and deep—even on those who once accepted but now reject him; who out of fear of the unknown may never have faced up to him; who, furiously irritated—‘he always steals the show’—wish he would fade away never to return.”