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