In the early twentieth century, both Mai Rogers Coe and her daughter, Natalie Mai, achieved technical prowess on the piano with careful application and practice and only on the finest instruments available. Both mother and daughter played at home at Planting Fields on a 1913 Steinway Model B grand piano that remains in Coe Hall’s Gallery today.
The piano’s prestige and popularity grew steadily from the late 1800s to the time when Natalie Mai studied the instrument with a succession of tutors, around 1926. This was due to several factors, including the rapid rise of industrialization and capitalistic innovations like payment plans, which lowered the cost of an in-home piano to a price that, while not inexpensive, put the purchase of a piano within reach of families outside of the upper classes. In Europe and America, the aftermath and economic upheaval of political revolutions, too, gave way to a “new, mushrooming middle class—unprecedented numbers of men and women now eager for the accoutrements of fine living.”
Not only were more people purchasing pianos, learning to play them became an increasingly important part of education for girls at the end of the nineteenth century. A new musical pedagogy took hold, and the integration of piano instruction in schools centered on developing students’ musicality over rote drills. This emphasis on artistry dovetailed with the emergence of the piano as a powerful solo instrument, overtaking the reputation of the harpsichord, the piano’s forerunner, as a purely supporting instrument in a larger ensemble. The first modern conservatories, where young musicians could devote years of intense practice and study of their instruments, were first founded in the nineteenth century, too, signaling the societal acceptance and encouragement of virtuoso pianists.
For young women like Natalie Mai, though she did not attend a conservatory, learning to play the piano was touted as a physical expression of “woman impulses” and emotional energy, “pour[ing] out the torrent of her emotions through her finger-ends, direct[ing] the forces of her youth and romanticism” out onto the keyboard. Very few women at this time could hope to pursue professional musicianship as a career path, however. It remained closed off because of complicated gender bias that affected young boys, too: boys, by learning to play piano, risked feminization, but girls, if they progressed too far and too well, “trespass[ed] into a male realm when they got too good at it.”
Come view the archival exhibition in our Coe Hall Visitor Center about music at Planting Fields over the past century and stay to see the Coes’ 1913 Steinway and hear a short piano composition by contemporary composer Nico Muhly that is part of the exhibition, Nico Muhly: Pastoral (Indoors/Outdoors).
Caitlin Colban-Waldron, Michael D. Coe Archivist
References:
Piano Roles, James Parakilas, 1999
AC Wheeler, The New York World, 1875
A Natural History of the Piano, Stuart Isacoff, 2011
What hours is this archival exhibit open?
Our archival exhibitions are on view in the Visitor Center, which is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9am-5pm.