Jeannette Thurber

Jeannette Thurber (also known as Jeannette Meyers Thurber; January 29, 1850 in Delhi, New York – January 2, 1946 in Bronxville, New York) was amongst the first major patrons of classical music in the United States. Thurber established the National Conservatory of Music of America in 1885—the first of its kind and an endeavor that some say ushered in the first orchestral music with a distinctively American sound. But in a very radical stance for the day, Thurber championed the rights of women, people of color and the handicapped to attend her school, sometimes on full scholarship. This was 1885—two decades since the end of the American Civil War—and her school was racially integrated, promoted women, and had an inclusive stance toward the handicapped.

Thurber founded the school in part because of her belief that a nation should cultivate its own unique music—an unusual stance when the prevailing attitude was that all cultured art, especially orchestral music, came from Germany or Italy. While running the school, she sponsored competitions for American musicians to develop American music.

The National Conservatory of Music of America was the outstanding institution for professional musical preparation in the United States for some 25 years or more. At its height in the 1890s it boasted a faculty of international renown ... and initiated a course of studies whose features became a basis for the curriculum now taken for granted in the colleges and conservatories of this country. Its achievements resulted from the endeavors of a single visionary: Jeannette M Thurber, a wealthy, idealistic New Yorker who devoted most of her life to the school ... Although her innovative design for the Conservatory was influential in shaping the course of American music for the 20th century, Mrs. Thurber and her school have slipped into undeserved obscurity."^[1]