Margaret Ruthven Lang
Lang, Margaret Ruthven (27 Nov. 1867-30 May 1972), violinist and composer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Benjamin Johnson Lang, one of the city's leading organists and choir masters. Her family was socially prominent and musically active in Boston, and as a young girl Margaret received strong musical training from her father. She began writing music at age seventeen. Her family connections aided her artistic visibility and her compositional career. In 1890, for example, she wrote a piece for male chorus entitled The Jumblies, a musical setting of poetry by Edward Lear; her father premiered the work.
At age seventeen Lang traveled to Munich to study violin and counterpoint. Back in Boston she studied the finer points of harmony, orchestration, and composition under George Whitefield Chadwick and Edward MacDowell, the most famous composers of late nineteenth-century America. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, twenty-one American composers submitted works in a competition. Only four compositions received awards and performances. One of the four was Lang's Witichis, op. 10. In 1893 the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed her Dramatic Overture, op. 12, the first work by an American woman to be performed by a major symphony orchestra.
Lang's composition style was a mixture of German Romanticism and Impressionism, with relatively conservative use of harmonic dissonance and clear elements of Irish and Scottish folk melodies. Critics praised Lang's music for its unobtrusive spontaneity. Her admirers found her music refreshingly distinct from that of many of the modernists of the early twentieth century whose music was often considered harsh. Champions of the modern styles considered Lang's music old-fashioned, but traditionalists found its focus on pleasing sonorities rather than compositional techniques to be gratifying. Her conservative critics applauded especially.
The Langs were a family of considerable wealth (when Benjamin Lang died in 1909, Margaret Lang received a legacy of $600,000), and throughout her long life Lang never needed to earn a living. She never married and wrote music only until 1917. Through all her years, she was very much a "lady of Beacon Hill," maintaining a social circle of friends and keeping current with the latest intellectual trends. She never moved from the family home at 2 Brimmer Street and attended virtually every performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from its founding in 1881. On her hundredth birthday Erich Leinsdorf conducted a concert of the Boston Symphony in her honor. She died in Boston at the age of 104.
Bibliography
There is no biography of Margaret Lang, nor is there any study of the Lang family. There is one biographical article, E. Syford, "Margaret Ruthven Lang," New England Magazine, Mar. 1912, p. 22, and one anthology, T. F. Ryan, Recollections of an Old Musician (1899), both of which contemporaneously applaud Lang's musical talent and demonstrate that interest in her is not mere curiosity stemming from either the fact that she lived to such an old age or that she was female. In Unsung: A History of Women in American Music (1980), Christine Ammer dedicates a few pages to Lang's life (and celebrates Lang as much for her gender as for her artistry). Ammer summarizes the previous writings about Lang but provides no actual analyses of any of her music. A substantive obituary is in the Boston Globe, 4 June 1972.
Alan Levy
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Citation:
Alan Levy. "Lang, Margaret Ruthven";
http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-02305.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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