Speaker: Susan Pickett, Catharine Chism Professor of Music, Emerita, Whitman College

Jacques Bauer emigrated from France (Alsace) to America in 1855 and immediately joined the Ninth Infantry. He would spend part of his army life helping build Fort Walla Walla. After he was discharged from the army in 1860, he stayed on in Walla Walla, building up a business on Main Street. He soon married another Alsatian emigrant, Julia Heyman (quite a story in itself), a linguist who spoke seven languages fluently, who taught many of her fellow Walla Walla emigrants English. Their first child, Emilie Frances, may have been the first Jewish child born here, in 1865. Their seventh and last child, Marion Eugenie, was born here in 1882. The Bauer family, then, had a prominent presence in Walla Walla until Jacques’s death in 1890, at which point the remaining Bauers moved to Portland, Oregon. Emilie Frances, who was initially a music critic for the Oregonian, moved to NYC around the turn of the century, quickly becoming a celebrated critic for several magazines and newspapers there. She was the first American critic to whom Claude Debussy allowed an interview (undoubtedly because of her fluent French). Emilie Frances’s friends included many celebrated people of the time, from the singer Enrico Caruso to Mark Twain. Marion Eugenie soon joined her sister in NYC, studying music composition. During her lifetime, Marion composed over 160 works, including a symphonic poem that was performed by the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski, in 1947. Marion died in 1955, the last of the direct Bauer line. Like so many women who were recognized for their talents during their lifetimes, both sisters disappeared from the annals of music history until Susan Pickett’s curiosity led her to rediscover the careers, writings, and music of these two remarkable women. Pickett’s book, Marion and Emilie Frances Bauer: from the Wild West to American Modernism, leads the reader through the family history and the sisters’ triumphs and tragedies.

Susan Pickett, violinist and musicologist, is a native of Los Angeles.  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Occidental College, holds an M.M. degree from Indiana University in Violin Performance (High Honors), and a Ph. D. in Fine Arts (Musicology) from Texas Tech University. Her violin teachers included John Browning, Sr., James Buswell, Franco Gulli, and James Barber. Dr. Pickett joined the faculty of Whitman College in 1981. In 1996 she was appointed Catharine Gould Chism Professor of Music, retiring in 2018. During the past thirty years, Dr. Pickett has uncovered the music of several hundred women composers from the 17th-20th centuries, and she has published more than 40 editions their music and has recorded three CDs. Her research has been featured by the Associated Press, Chronicle of Higher Education, "Voice of America" numerous NPR stations, as well as a special segment on ABC's "Good Morning America." She is now working on a biography of the composer Samuel Jones and is also writing a weekly column for the Sunday U-B entitled “Right Here, 157 Years Ago.”

Talk begins at 4 pm.