“Yet an artist must be a virtuoso in the modern sense to do his full duty.  And here in America that duty is to help those who are groping for something higher and better musically; to help without rebuffing them.  When I first began my career as a concert violinist I did pioneer work for the cause of the American woman violinist, going on with the work begun by Mme. Camilla Urso.  A strong prejudice then existed against women fiddlers, which even yet has not altogether been overcome.  The very fact that a Western manager recently told Mr. Turner with surprise that he ‘had made a success of a woman artist’ proves it.  When I first began to play here in concert this prejudice was much stronger.  Yet I kept on and secured engagements to play with orchestra at a time when they were difficult to obtain.  Theodore Thomas liked my playing (he said I had brains), and it was with his orchestra that I introduced the concertos of Saint-Saens (C min.), Lalo (F min.), and others, to American audiences.

“The fact that I realized that my sex was against me in a way led me to be startlingly authoritative and convincing in the masculine manner when I first played.  This is a mistake no woman violinist should make.  And from the moment that James Huneker wrote that I ’was not developing the feminine side of my work,’ I determined to be just myself, and play as the spirit moved me, with no further thought of sex or sex distinctions which, in Art, after all, are secondary.  I never realized this more forcibly than once, when, sitting as a judge, I listened to the competitive playing of a number of young professional violinists and pianists.  The individual performers, unseen by the judges, played in turn behind a screen.  And in three cases my fellow judges and myself guessed wrongly with regard to the sex of the players.  When we thought we had heard a young man play it happened to be a young woman, and vice versa.

“To return to the question of concert-work.  You must not think that I have played only foreign music in public.  I have always believed in American composers and in American composition, and as an American have tried to do justice as an interpreting artist to the music of my native land.  Aside from the violin concertos by Harry Rowe Shelly and Henry Holden Huss, I have played any number of shorter original compositions by such representative American composers as Arthur Foote, Mrs. H.H.A.  Beach, Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Arthur Bird, Edwin Grasse, Marion Bauer, Cecil Burleigh, Harry Gilbert, A. Walter Kramer, Grace White, Charles Wakefield Cadman and others.  Then, too, I have presented transcriptions by Arthur Hartmann, Francis Macmillan and Sol Marcosson, as well as some of my own.  Transcriptions are wrong, theoretically; yet some songs, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Song of India’ and some piano pieces, like the Dvorak Humoresque, are so obviously effective on the violin that a transcription justifies itself.  My latest temptative in that direction is my ‘Four American Folk Songs,’ a simple setting of four well-known airs with connecting cadenzas—­no variations, no special development!  I used them first as encores, but my audiences seemed to like them so well that I have played them on all my recent programs.