Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES • SUMMER 2016 • sai-national.org 10 N O P S T U X Y Z e Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music stands as the largest circulating collection of orchestral performance sets in the world. With over 22,000 titles the Fleisher Collection houses virtually the entire standard repertoire and has become internationally renowned for its many rare and out-of-print works. A unique source of 19th- and 20th- century American music, the Fleisher Collection also boasts the largest holding of orchestral music by female, Latin American, African descent, and Moravian composers, among others. e Fleisher Collection lends music to hundreds of performance organizations of all sizes and each year circulates an average of 25,000 scores and parts around the globe for reading sessions, concerts, and recordings. In the 2014-2015 season, works from the Fleisher Collection reached over 275 organizations on five continents. On a local level, for more than half a century the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia (OSP) has benefitted from the complementary lending services extended exclusively to Philadelphia- based organizations by the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Many members of Sigma Alpha Iota participate in regular reading sessions of the OSP. is special relationship prompted a recent visit to the Collection by several SAIs. Visitors enjoyed a private guided tour of the Collection by the curator and Fleisher Project Consultant Gina Bixler. Philadelphia philanthropist Edwin Adler Fleisher (1877-1959) began the Collection when he founded the first training orchestra in the United States – over a half century before Claudio Abreu's famed El Sistema. e Little Symphony Club, as it was first known, antedated the Curtis Institute (1924) and organizations such as the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (Frederick Stock, 1919) and National Orchestral Association (Léon Barzin, 1930). e youngest of five children, Fleisher was the son of a highly successful wool manufacturer. He attended Penn Charter School and graduated with an A.B. from Harvard in 1899. His piano skills were adequate to take a course in harmony in his senior year with Walter Raymond Spalding (1865-1962), and he studied violin and viola privately with Gustav Hille (1852-ca.1925?) and Louis Svecenski (1862-1926). Shortly aer graduation, Fleisher took his place as treasurer and director in the family business and took part in Sunday evening musical soirées sponsored by his mother at their home on Green Street. His parents were lauded as "patrons of music and the fine arts." His mother, Celia, was a pianist of merit who served as one of eighteen directors for the Women's Committee for the Philadelphia Orchestra. e first meeting of Edwin Fleisher's pioneering Symphony Club in the fall of 1909 came at a time when Europe dominated the world of classical music. Germany itself had forty-three professional orchestras; the United States had ten. German-born conductor Fritz Scheel (1852- 1907) had formed the Philadelphia Orchestra from a group of German musicians in 1900, and the organization was populated exclusively by Europeans when it passed to Karl Pohlig (1864- 1928), also a German, in 1907. ere were no community orchestras, and the universities MUSIC COLLECTION The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection Fleisher Collection Curator Dr. Gary Galván, with SAI members Jo Cauffman, Rheta Smith, Lauren Parsinitz, Martha Frampton, and Jacquelyn Howell.

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