Mary Howe: Songs And Duets – Courtney Maina

The name of Mary Howe (1882–1964) seems to have vanished from the history books. But she was an important voice in American music in the first half of the twentieth century, as an activist and organiser and, especially, as a composer. This first-ever album of her songs shows her late-Romantic style open to influences from Debussy, Mahler, Richard Strauss and other contemporaries: she was, she said, ‘alert for new sensations, like a Puritan on a holiday’.