International Women in Music Day is March 28. Many may not know that the rich music culture of Fort Collins has a lot to do with two women musicians that left lasting impressions.
If you have attended a Fort Collins Symphony concert, you have Editha Todd Leonard to thank. Leonard was born in 1904, and before she could “talk plain,” her parents bought her a violin from the Sears Roebuck catalog for $10. She got fiddle lessons in exchange for her dad building stuff for her music teacher.
It wasn’t until she started substitute teaching for a junior high orchestra that she thought about creating a musical group.
“The kids had so much fun, that we just kept going,” Leonard said in an oral history recorded by the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. “I never called it a symphony. I didn't have that grand of an idea, but we called it a Concert Orchestra.”
In 1922 when she was only 18 years old, she created the Fort Collins Concert Orchestra. The orchestra was made up of volunteer teachers, musicians and students that played small events and provided music for silent films and vaudeville shows, according to Lesley Struc, the curator for the archive at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery.
That volunteer group later transformed and became the Fort Collins Symphony in 1949. Leonard was concertmaster of the Fort Collins Symphony for 14 years, and then their business manager for another 5 years.
She was also the president of the Woman’s Club of Fort Collins several times and started the Junior Woman’s Club. Leonard also participated in the Fort Collins League of Women Voters, Larimer County Women’s Coordinating Council, Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs, and more.
“[She] basically made it possible for women to have things to do that maybe were outside of a career, if they were denied a career, they could still be involved with the city, by being integral in some of these movements to bring culture to the city and to support the music scene,” Struc said. “I get exhausted reading about all of the things that she did during her lifetime.”
Around the same time in 1887, another Edith – Edith Pegg Bair – grew up in Fort Collins. She started a musical group with her six sisters, called the Fort Collins Little Women.
“Everybody played the organ, but we were not professional ever,” Bair said in an oral history recorded by the Museum of Discovery. “My mother didn’t play, we just picked it up.”
She also wrote a song book called "Song Thoughts of Children" in 1933, made up of folksy nursery songs for kids.
The histories of these women are preserverved thanks to an oral history project conducted by the Museum of Discovery. In one recording from 1975, an 88-year-old Bair plays the piano at Good Samaritan Retirement Village. It’s her family piano that was purchased in 1905 that she brought to the party room to play for other residents. Bair’s eyesight was bad, so she plays everything from memory.
“She was so self-effacing and saying, ‘Oh, I never considered myself a musician,’” Struc said. “But clearly, it was a huge part of her life. And it's just very sweet to hear her play.”
Both women passed before the turn of the century, but their music and legacy lives on today.
“It really reiterates that whole sense of Fort Collins being the musical town, and I think these women just show that it's just such a part of our soul here in Northern Colorado to have this music that’s been playing since we started,” Struc said.
KUNC's sister station, the Colorado Sound, has special programming for International Women in Music Day. Check out their website to see what's airing and read some of those womens' histories.
