The lost composer: Alice Barnett and the paradox of fame and memory

Episode 24: Alice Barnett Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Which famous musicians of today will be remembered in a hundred years? Beyoncé or Taylor Swift seem like sure bets, but what about our hometown heroes, Thee Sacred Souls or Blink-182? Their songs will probably still exist, but will anyone be listening? Will anyone care? If we could travel to the future, the answer might surprise us because history shows that very famous people can almost entirely be forgotten in a matter of decades.

One such forgotten musical star is San Diego composer Alice Barnett.

[“Boat Song” from In a Gondola, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: One hundred years ago, Alice Barnett was a big deal.

Katina Mitchell: There are thousands of mentions of her in the newspapers, from the New York Times and Los Angeles, Minneapolis. Her pieces were played on national radio and also in concerts, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Evans: This is Katina Mitchell, a San Diego musician, voice teacher and musicologist, essentially an anthropologist of music. For the past few years, Katina has been immersed in Alice Barnett's world, digging through archives and sorting through old, brittle handwritten scores. Because as successful as Alice was in her time, today…

Mitchell: Most people still have never heard of Alice Barnett and I, little by little, trying to change that.

Evans: Before Katina came along, Alice Barnett was truly forgotten. Her music wasn't performed anywhere aside from a single student's recital in 2009. Even Katina, a musicologist who lives in San Diego, was unfamiliar with her work. She only stumbled upon Alice when she was bored during the COVID lockdowns and started looking into her neighborhood's history and former residence. And she became an instant fan.

Mitchell: So I started researching her and decided to bring back her music because I liked it. I thought it's worth knowing. People should know about her.

Evans: Alice Barnett's extreme obscurity was not inevitable. If you went back to the 1930s and talked to music lovers, many would've said that Alice Barnett's name and music would live on. After all, that happened for her similarly famous contemporaries

Mitchell: Legacy itself can be kind of arbitrary sometimes, I think. And so the people who become the most famous. For example, Amy Beach. Amy Beach was a female American composer composing at the same time as Alice Barnett. Everybody knows Amy Beach. Nobody knows Alice Barnett.

Evans: Why are there hundreds of recordings of Amy Beach compositions — and some that are racking up over 10 million plays on Spotify — while Alice Barnett, you can't even find on any streaming platform? Is it just that Beach's music is better? Katina doesn't think so.

Mitchell: I think the quality is similar. I like Alice Barnett's better myself, but that's just taste.

[“Mood” by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: But what really drew Katina in was Alice's compelling life story. A so-called little girl from a small town in Illinois, she was constantly belittled. Yet she wowed the music world's elite in Europe. Eventually settling in Wild West era San Diego, helping turn it into a cultural hub.

Mitchell: Reading her correspondences in her journals and her scrapbooks, it paints an intricate story. And so when I sing her songs, I'm thinking of those things. I'm thinking of what I've gotten to know about her.

Evans: Alice and Katina's intertwined story shows us that history is a human activity. It requires motivation and real work. History is not recorded automatically. Even if something was a huge deal in its time, if nobody works to preserve it, it fades away and disappears.

César Hidalgo: I think this phenomenon that we forget things is more common than we think, and we might not see it because of course we don't know what we have forgotten.

Evans: We spoke to some of the world's leading experts on the dynamics of fame over time. There are fascinating theories about how and why certain art and people are remembered while others aren't.

Hidalgo: To me it's a bit of a story of economic incentives and talent.

Swapnil Rai: So it is also tied to like the historical moment, which is very much a factor of luck.

Evans: So while there are lots of factors, some surprising and some seemingly arbitrary, the outcome is important. This is how the story of humanity is written. It determines the art and ideas that are passed down and influence future generations. And thanks to Katina, Alice is getting a second chance to be a part of that story. Alice Barnett is coming back to life.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people art and movements, redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: A couple of months ago, producer Anthony and I took a trip to the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park.

Tina Zarpour: Hello! Hi.

Evans: Hi, I’m Julia.

Zarpour: Nice to meet you. Welcome.

Anthony Wallace: Nice to meet you.

Zarpour: I will take you down.

Evans: Ooh, it's like a separate entrance.

Zarpour: Yes.

Evans: On the first floor there's a museum, but in the basement is a treasure trove of records and artifacts from San Diego's past.

It smells good. You know that smell?

Wallace: Yeah, books.

Zarpour: We like to say we have over 3 million photographs.

Wallace: Wow.

Wallace: Historic clothing and art. And the document archives, so that's everything from letters to manuscripts to architectural drawings and maps, business papers, that kind of stuff.

Evans: People, like our helper here Tina Zarpour, at the San Diego History Center work with academics, writers and hobbyists who pick through the millions of objects in the archive.

Tina Zarpour: We depend on researchers like Katina to shed light on things that we didn't necessarily know about. I mean, she brings a very unique skillset.

Evans: All this information about the past can sit here in the basement, but if no one looks through it and brings it back into public consciousness, it's almost as if it doesn't exist. And at that very moment that we were taking in the archive room, Katina Mitchell was continuing her hard work of bringing composer Alice Barnett back into existence.

Zarpour: She's been at it for a while. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have, you have to be so, and you know, she wants to look at more stuff. Yeah.

Wallace: So she's doing it right now?

Zarpour: Yeah, she's doing it right now.

Wallace: That's cool.

Evans: With white gloves on, Katina was buried in a collection of delicate papers from a century ago.

Mitchell: So these are some programs in Alice Barnett's scrapbook. And she'll go through and write sometimes in pencil or pen the date, like the year or circle her name or underline it in the article so that it's easy to find.

Wallace: When is that paper?

Evans: It’s the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Mitchell: This is 1926. This is an article about her, Writer of art songs lives here. There's something magical about opening a book from over a hundred years ago in seeing someone's own pencil compositions and handwriting.

Evans: It was a series of striking coincidences that really pulled Katina down this rabbit hole into forgotten music history. Katina and her family moved to San Diego during the pandemic. And with the world of singing and voice lessons shut down, she suddenly had some time on her hands.

Mitchell: I was researching the history of my house and right across the street from my house was the home of Alice Barnett. And I thought, well, I'd like to find out more about her. And the more I looked into her life, the more parallels I found. Some of them kind of weird actually, like kind of uncanny. So she was born in May 1886. I was born in May 1986. She went to study music for college. So did I. In 1909, she moved to Berlin, Germany to study, and in 2009 I moved to Berlin, Germany to study. Her teacher's last name was Kaun, K-A-U-N. My teacher's last name was Kaun, K-A-U-N. Very strange. And then, she had two sons and I have two sons, so there are so many parallels. And reading her letters, I felt like I got to know her and I like her.

Evans: When Katina started researching Alice's life, she expected to spend an afternoon sifting through a few scraps of music, but instead she found a bounty. Newspaper clippings, letters and notebooks filled with handwritten notes, music, even doodles. The music was perfect for her own soprano vocal range, and there was enough for a whole concert. Katina's since been working on performing and recording Alice's work

[“Love in the Wind” by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Mitchell: So one of the pieces that I'm performing is called “Love in the Wind,” and she wrote on it, my first song. And she saved it, but she also wrote, I don't think it's any good.

I think her music is accessible. But also complex and there are moments of unexpected harmonies. It's definitely impressionistic, but it's not experimental for the sake of being experimental.

Evans: The path to fame for Alice Barnett was not easy. She grew up in Lewiston, Illinois. Her dad taught her piano and she started writing her own tunes when she was just six years old. As a teenager, her family sent her to live with her grandfather in Chicago so she could learn from the best musicians in the state.

Mitchell: She wanted to study with a composition teacher in Chicago who said his waiting list was 185 candidates-long, and she said, well, can I at least come see you? She thought maybe she could convince him, and she brought some manuscripts and then he said, OK, your lesson is Friday at 3 p.m.

Evans: That determination was important. At the time, women were mostly seen as performers, not composers. And she graduated college at a time when only one in five bachelor's degrees were awarded to women. But she was a star student. And after college, a big opportunity came her way. Here's Katina quoting Alice's writing from memory, something she impressively kept doing.

Mitchell: She wrote a lot of postcards and letters home and she wrote, you'll be thunderstruck when I tell you what has befallen me, and what she is reporting is that her grandfather had consented to allow her to study in Europe for one year, and she wrote home that she needs to take advantage of this opportunity right away before he changes his mind.

Evans: A hint of sexism followed her everywhere, but Alice was defiant and her songs spoke for themselves.

Mitchell: People called her a little girl a lot. Her teacher in Germany, when she first came in, referred to her as a little girl and said, that little girl has something to say to the world. She was pretty determined and also enthusiastic and had a little mischief in her.

[“Boat Song” from In a Gondola by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: Her teacher told her that since she had just one year in Germany, there would be no writing music, just drills and practice all the time.

Mitchell: But she was composing songs anyway, and she brought one to show him and he was mad, so he threw it in the waste basket and then he got up to leave and she went and got it back out of the waste basket and took it back home with her and then showed it to her old teacher in Chicago, who said it was one of the finest songs ever written.

Her composition teacher in Germany was also a pianist, just like she was a pianist. That was her main instrument, and she performed her own compositions on the piano a lot. And the piano parts are difficult to play because she was very well-trained pianist. And one of the newspaper reviews wrote that the piano parts are works of art in themselves.

At the end of her year in Germany, she met a violin student named Samuel Price, fell in love and got married and his family was from San Diego, so that's how she ended up here.

Evans: Alice and her husband settled in San Diego and had two kids. She was writing songs and teaching music, pursuing her dream life, but that dream didn't last long. In an era when just 10% of marriages ended in divorce, Alice left her husband.

Mitchell: And she stayed in San Diego for the rest of her life. And she supported herself as a single mother just through her music. She had two sons and herself to support. She taught music and she wrote more songs at that time than any other time because she had to, to make money and earning royalties was one way that she earned an income. That's a very unusual circumstance for a woman of that time to be a professional musician, single mother and making it work.

Evans: After the divorce, Alice sent her kids to boarding school. Meanwhile, Alice herself moved into a boarding house, kind of like a hostel. She was so busy supporting herself and her children that there isn't a lot of correspondence for Katina to work with.

Mitchell: The only letter I found from that time was a really a sad one that she wrote over winter break saying that she couldn't believe that the break is almost over and it's about to be time to get back to the grind and that.

She didn't even get to see her children on Christmas.

Mitchell: She does have a set of songs called “Lie Awake” Songs that are all for her children, and they're innocent and a little bit playful. And all of those have to do with motherhood, lullabies, nighttime sleeping or staying awake when you're supposed to be sleeping. Sadness over being away from her children at that time probably was informing some of those compositions. I think “To-Night,” might be my favorite. That's one of the ones that was dedicated to her sons. It's really sweet and really bright, and the piano part is hard to play and it has a high note. It's a good song.

[“To-Night” by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: It was a tough time personally for Alice, but her songs were successful. They paid the bills, but about 10 years after the divorce though, a certain doctor changed her life.

Mitchell: So she did get remarried. And her life changed a lot when she did. Dr. George Roy Stevenson was a doctor and superintendent of the county hospital. So she quit teaching and she started composing even more because she had more time for it. So she wrote that after getting remarried, she wrote a song a day for a while.

Evans: Alice's songs had been known and performed since she was a young girl in Chicago. Some of the era's most famous musicians were big fans of her work, and she got what was kind of like the equivalent of a record deal when the major publisher G Schirmer put out her sheet music.

Mitchell: If you look at the published and unpublished, it seems that she has around 110 songs and, you know, the unpublished ones are handwritten scores. They can be kind of hard to read sometimes, and we're performing from some of those handwritten scores.

Oh yeah, see here's In a Gondola.

[“Dip Your Arm” from In a Gondola by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: In a Gondola is a song cycle, a series of connected pieces set to a Robert Browning poem of the same name. Katina calls it Alice's most mature work. It was her masterpiece enjoyed all over the world.

Evans: We even found an early version of it scribbled in her notebook from her days in Germany when she wasn't supposed to be writing songs at all. She was 23.

Mitchell: And she visited Venice during that time, so she was, you know, especially inspired.

Wallace: Looks like there's a smiley face.

Mitchell: Where's the smiley face? Oh yeah.

Evans: Amazing.

[“He Muses – Drifting” from In a Gondola by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: This collection of scrapbooks and notebooks in the San Diego History Center basement tells the story of a determined and prodigiously talented artist. She knew what she wanted and deserved, endured some tough times, but ultimately built a prestigious and respected career.

Mitchell: There's actually an article in a newspaper, I'm pretty sure this one was Minneapolis. She was visiting the city just on a weekend or something, and she decided to go to a concert there. And then to her surprise, one of her songs was on the program. And then she thought, oh, this is fun. Like, I'm here. and then the newspaper was so excited that she happened to be in the audience, that they then wrote a little article about this whole incident and called her one of the greatest songwriters in the country.

Evans: After the break, we'll examine how and why Alice Barnett fell into obscurity, and we'll explore the surprising ways that fame dynamics work over generations. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: We've heard how Alice Barnett rose from a talented kid in Lewiston, Illinois to an internationally recognized composer. Katina says that as far as she can tell, Alice was San Diego's most prominent art song composer of her time. So how does someone with that kind of stature disappear almost entirely?

Hidalgo: I'm César Hidalgo and I'm the director of the Center for Collective Learning.

Evans: For these questions, we go to a physicist.

Hidalgo: So in some way you can think that I'm a physicist that focuses on the thermodynamics of knowledge, how knowledge moves across a space, how knowledge grows in time, but also how knowledge is forgotten.

Evans: And the kind of knowledge that César is especially interested in is the public's collective knowledge of particular individuals. In other words, fame. His project uses page view data from Wikipedia to determine how much interest figures from the present and past are generating. He's been fascinated with the question of who gets remembered since he was a kid growing up in Chile.

Cesar Hidalgo: So after school runs out as a kid, you need to figure out what to do. And what I did is I would browse, you know, those encyclopedias, those books and I started to learn about all of these important people that had done important things like, you know, Faraday and Darwin, and you will learn about all of these scientists and all of these important figures. One of the things that was obvious to me is like, well, I'm learning about all of these people, but none of them are from around here, so how come only a few places produce these types of people and other places don't? It cannot be because just talent is so narrowly distributed in its origins. It must be that there's something beyond the source of talent that is determining its ability to flourish.

Evans: So we know Alice Barnett was clearly talented and well known in her time, but César has found that forgetting happens in two stages. At first, you're part of the public conversation. People literally talk about you. Then, that fades and your memory transfers into records, whether it's film, books or audio recordings. But how your work gets recorded for people to consume after your lifetime, that depends on the era you live in.

Hidalgo: And we find that every time a new technology is introduced, not only the number of people that we remember grows, but the composition changes. So there's very few famous artists and very few famous scientists before printing, and there are almost no famous actors before the introduction of film. The play writers were famous in the 1600s, but not the actors.

Evans: This is a good time to talk about how music worked in Alice's time, how people listened to and purchased it, because it was very different from how it works today.

Mitchell: Before there was recorded music, the source of music in the home was making it yourself. And most households had a piano. So once the phonograph arrived, it replaced the piano for many people.

Evans: The pre-phonograph era was also great for music teachers, which Alice was too. If you wanted to hear a song, you had to buy the sheet music and play it yourself, so you'd better learn piano. If you liked a particular song, you'd go look for more sheet music by the same artist. This is what it was like to be a fan of Alice Barnett back in her time.

Mitchell: But at a time when sheet music needed to be published or bought in order to be accessible, there was a lot of enthusiasm for songwriting at this time, and so she was coming up at a time when music itself, songwriting, these things were a big deal and a big part of culture.

Evans: So Alice lived and worked right before recorded music came along and changed everything. And in that time, publishers put a lot of marketing clout behind their songwriters, like Alice.

Mitchell: There were publicity materials, like a song pamphlet that has her picture on the front and it says “Songs by Alice Barnett.” And then you open it up and you can see all the titles of the ones that have been published, so that if there are some you want to order that you don't have yet, you can buy them.

Evans: This is not how we are used to following musicians today, but that's how it worked in Alice's time and the record of her music left for future generations is largely these written compositions. Given that, it makes sense that her memory has faded from our knowledge, it comes in a form that isn't familiar to us today.

Alice died in 1975. She wasn't actively working at the time, but she did live to see recorded music, a revolution that gave us the kind of modern music stars we recognize now. And that brings us to another major factor in whether someone is remembered. Were they working in a golden age?

Hidalgo: So I do think that there was a golden era of music, like between the ‘60s and the early ‘90s. That was associated to the fact that music during that period involved the creation of physical media that allowed monetization in a way that was not possible before and has not been possible since. So it was really the golden era of recorded music and you know, you go to cafe, you go to restaurant, you still are listening to the same classic rock songs, you know, from 30, 40 years ago.

Evans: This theory makes a lot of sense if you think about the most famous figures from history. In art or anything, they tend to be clustered around specific eras and places where everything came together just right to create a golden age. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci knew each other in Florence in the late 1400s. Plato was Aristotle's teacher in Athens, Beethoven and Mozart were both in Vienna in the late 1700s. Alice just missed the recorded music golden age. Pretty much right as her career wound down, Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan blew up all around the world and we can still hear their voices today in their recordings. This leads to an interesting question about how today's music stars will be remembered. Because according to César, that recorded music golden age is over.

Hidalgo: I think more recently what we have is a music scene that is based more on live events because that's where the monetization happens, you know? But I'm not sure if many of the people that are very famous today are gonna have the staying power to still be around 60 or 70 years from now.

Evans: So if we're no longer in a golden age of music, are we in a golden age of anything?

Hidalgo: With the development of television, we enter a golden age of sports. Athletes were never as famous as they have been nowadays. And I think that golden age continues to, you know, be rather strong.

Evans: So maybe in a few centuries, Lionel Messi and Serena Williams will be the Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo of the sports golden age.

Hidalgo: We are also, I think, in a golden age of software entrepreneurs, and they're all other golden ages, and those have also shifted with internet.

Evans: He adds that we're in a burgeoning golden age of YouTubers. Maybe Mr. Beast will carry on as the Elvis of YouTube. For Alice Barnett, though, remember there was another big factor that played into her public image.

Mitchell: She did an interview at the end of her life talking about how she had an extraordinary talent by masculine standards, but it was judged differently because she was a woman. A lot of reviewers at the time commented on her gracious femininity. They would say things like, her real job is raising her two sons. Or, if we didn't say something once in a while to bring her compositions to light, we believe she would go along contentedly as a homemaker and a baker of marvelous angel food cakes.

Rai: Gender is an important component and can often hamper people's abilities.

Evans: Swapnil Rai is another academic who has studied and written about enduring fame. She's found that for female artists especially, it's not enough to just be a great performer.

Rai: So talent is a given, so it has to be an artist who has talent, but what else goes with it? As I argue in my own scholarly work, it is tied to networks, networks of power, networks of influence.

Evans: So this is about making the move from performer into an important industry figure. Examples include Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow transitioning from actresses to multihyphenate media moguls. And there are a few in music who may defy César's prediction that very few musicians from our time will be known in the future.

Swapnil Rai: Taylor Swift has proven again and again that she really has the business acumen. I mean, just taking all the music and making it her version. The fact that how she thinks in conjunction with industrial networks beyond her own stardom and art, you can create ways to make your fame last.

Evans: So let's return to a big question we posed earlier. Why is Alice Barnett forgotten while Amy Beach, that other famous female composer from a similar time, is still well known today? One possibility involves the networks of power Swapnil is talking about, and that can come down to geography. Amy Beach was in Boston, a cultural epicenter of America at the time. She had ties to Harvard and was president of the Board of the New England Conservatory of Music, a major music school. Alice was in a much less influential situation in San Diego.

Mitchell: She believed a big reason why she might not have been as famous as she could have been is that she lived in San Diego. She thought if she lived on the East Coast or in Europe, active in the musical circles there, she thought that that would've been a much bigger opportunity. She said that she was horrified when she moved to San Diego and that the streets were dirt, but she committed to it.

Evans: And Alice did a lot herself to boost San Diego's musical relevance.

She booked big musical acts, brought them to San Diego and taught hundreds of students.

Mitchell: It was in her house that the San Diego Symphony Association was founded. She was spending more of her time doing that than like preserving her legacy. And I find that really inspiring because I think without her presence in San Diego, we wouldn't have the musical community that I now partake in.

[“‘Twas in the Glorious Month of May” by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: Another reason Alice might not be as well known today is her genre. She wrote art songs, not a musical style that most people know about today.

Mitchell: Traditionally, the term has been used to describe an original composition in the classical style. They're usually poetry first. And then the composer will make a setting of the poetry. And then it's an art song. It’s very much of its time, and it was right in style.

Evans: Usually Alice would find poems she liked and then write music for them. Amy Beach wrote art songs too, but she also composed more traditional instrumental classical pieces, and those are her hits on Spotify. Maybe the art song genre has been lost because it got caught in an awkward place in the cycle of golden ages.

Hidalgo: But what that tells me is the value of having different people remember different things. Knowledge and memory is all that we have. We have nothing else. So imagine like a simple model in which everyone can remember just a thousand other people, OK? In that model, if everybody remembers the same 1,000 people, we're carrying vertical knowledge forward. But if in that world everybody maybe knows the same 10 people, but all of the other 990 are different, we can carry lots of knowledge forward. So the work of like musicologists and historians that often focus on people that are not the most famous people of their era is extremely important because they're adding that diversity of knowledge to our record.

And I think that's the value that is being generated by people going back into the archives and helping rescue knowledge that if it wasn't for them, would be forgotten. And they're gonna print it in a book, they're gonna put it in a podcast, and they're gonna kick that can of knowledge a little bit forward.

[“Mood” by Alice Barnett, performed by Katina Mitchell and Yewon Lee]

Evans: Alice and Katina's story with their lives separated by exactly 100 years is a reminder of the importance of a diverse history. When we boil down the past into a few golden ages, a whole colorful world of nuance and variety is left out of the story. And without people like Katina, those fascinating details of the human story would collect dust in an archive.

Now those old papers in the San Diego History Center are being made into music once again.

One of Alice's pieces that Katina has been performing is called “Mood.” It's actually the only one set to a poem that Alice wrote herself. She composed it in 1915, during the time she was settling into life as a single mother in San Diego. It's idealistic reflecting optimism that dusty Southern California would one day become something great. The song is dedicated to one of Alice's beloved collaborators in town, Edna Darch. It's a tribute to the musical community she was building, the one that helped her through a difficult stretch of her life. The same musical community that would one day support Katina in her work to uncover Alice's life and music.

Mitchell: I see very directly how her commitment to music in the community laid the foundation for so much of what we have still happening today.

Evans: Her time unraveling Alice's story has also inspired Katina personally. She wants the world to know Alice Barnett, but she realizes that a community can outlive a name and inspire artists for generations.

Mitchell: I care a lot about our musical community and its future, and so it's inspiring to me to see that she sowed seeds that grew. And I hope that I'm doing the same.

Evans: A special thanks to Katina Mitchell, César Hidalgo, Swapnil Rai, Tina Zarpour, the San Diego History Center and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library for their help with this episode. And to Yewon Lee, Katina's collaborator and pianist in the performances and recordings of Alice's compositions that you heard in this episode.

Next week on The Finest, our season finale. Prison book programs can be a lifeline for incarcerated people. We hear from volunteers at a local book packing event about the arbitrary restrictions and censorship that they deal with. And we talk to someone who's been through the system and found solace and strength in reading.

Cherish Burtson: The only brief escape we had were books and I went through so many books. I think that's the only thing that allowed me to actually get through it.

Evans: I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.