Conventions/Conferences

by Kurt-Alexander Zeller
1 August 2008
When Mu Phi Epsilon was founded almost 105 years ago on November 13th, 1903, at the Metropolitan College of Music in the uptown Mt. Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, the 13 women who were its charter members chose the violet as the new fraternity’s official flower. It was not unusual for a fraternal organization to choose a flower as a symbol (another music fraternity founded that same year has the red American Beauty rose as its symbol), but nobody seems to know exactly why our founders chose the violet.

Perhaps it was merely that it is a well-known flower whose very name is synonymous with purple, the royal hue that had been chosen as Mu Phi Epsilon’s color. But the violet seems an unlikely symbol for the kind of bold endeavor in which those 13 women under the pioneering leadership of Elizabeth Mathias Fuqua were engaged. Indeed, our American English includes the slang phrase “shrinking violet” to describe a person who hangs back, withdraws from involvement with others, avoids shining in the public eye, and is over-cautious and uncommitted. Hardly an image for a group that includes the electrifying Ruslan Biryukov and Mary Au, or the pioneering Dr. Frances Kinne, or even “Dr. Indiana Marcus Jones” and his intrepid seekers of the Onyx Circle.
We musicians also are familiar with an image of the violet presented in “Das Veilchen,” one of Mozart’s most famous songs, in which Goethe’s poem tells of “ein herzigs Veilchen” (a lovable little violet) that is simply delighted to be trampled to death by a passing shepherdess it happens to think is dreamy. It actually rejoices at its own destruction at the hands (or rather, in this case, the clod-hopping feet) of the indifferent object of its affection. Goethe may have called that lovable, but the next century invented a new word for that sort of thing: masochistic. Again, not exactly a desirable role model.

And violets get no respect. Most are rather small of bloom and short of stature, dwarfed by flashier garden divas, like the American Beauty rose I mentioned earlier. They have tiny stalks, so they’re not much use in formal flower arrangements, and guys, take it from someone who’s been there: your Valentine just isn’t going to be impressed with two dozen long-stemmed violets. Other flowers get all the attention. We don’t deck our churches with Easter violets. Nobody ever says, “A violet by any other name would smell as sweet” or “Gather ye violet-buds whilst ye may.” Bobbie Burns dinna say, “O, my love is like a purple, purple violet,” and Tiny Tim did not “Tiptoe through the Violets.”
Yet despite all that, of all our fraternity symbols, the violet is the one I find most inspiring and most appropriate. It exemplifies exactly what I think Mu Phi Epsilon and its members should be. To explain why, perhaps we need a short botany lesson. To begin with, the scientific name of the violet is Viola odorata—and what other flower shares its name with a musical instrument? (One which also, by the way, is frequently overlooked in favor of flashier neighbors but has a rich charm of its own.) Music is our first ideal, and it is suggested even in our mascot flower.

Next, violets have many traits that we in Mu Phi Epsilon value and wish to emulate. The botanical family Violaceae is one of the most wide-spread of flower families. There are over 1000 species. Examples are found on all the world’s continents except Antarctica. There are violet species in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Polynesia. They’re found in tropical rainforests, on Andean mountain slopes, in the Australian bush, in European meadows, and in Georgia woodlands. Mu Phi Epsilon hasn’t yet reached that level of international distribution, but what a goal to which to aspire in our second century!

And violets are diverse. Despite the stereotype associated with the name, not all violets are purple. Some really are blue, like in the old rhyme. Others are reddish, pink, yellow, white, green, buff, or just about any color except true black. Members of the Viola family come in more different colors than any other flower family, including those of roses. Not only that, but they come in all different shapes and sizes, too. Very many of the Violaceae are the small perennial herbs we think of when someone says “violet,” but the worldwide family also includes larger plants, some shrubs, and even a few trees.

Mu Phi Epsilon, too, has always been a leader in diversity. By decades, we were the first professional music fraternity to become co-educational, and our 30-year history of welcoming the talents and contributions of both female and male members on an equal footing has immeasurably enriched our fraternal bond; we certainly are the only music fraternity with gender parity among its Executive Board’s elected officers, which now consist of 3 women and 3 men.

Even earlier, Mu Phi Epsilon welcomed as collegiate members musicians like Ruth Watanabe and Shirley Verrett (who later became, respectively, the eminent musicologist who oversaw the world-famous Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music and one of the world’s greatest opera singers) at a time in American history when Ruth’s family was being removed from their home on the West Coast and shipped off to internment camps by their own government because of their ethnic heritage and when Shirley’s family were forced to leave their home in the South to escape legal discrimination which saw only the color of their skin. Mu Phi Epsilon, however, looked at these women and saw only the content of their character and the depth of their talent. Even the act of Mu Phi Epsilon’s founding by women in 1903, 17 years before any of them ever would be entitled to vote in a presidential election like this year’s, was a direct challenge to doors that were closed to capable musicians because of who they were, not what they could do. For its entire existence, Mu Phi Epsilon has stood proudly for increasing the diversity, violet-like, within the family of musicians.