Jeannette Thurber

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.

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.

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.

[5] Her success was due, in part, to her conviction that her school required an outstanding and publicly-celebrated faculty: its first director was Jacques Bouhy, a world-renowned baritone.

Burleigh's rendering of African-American spirituals had a profound effect on Dvorak's compositions and served as the basis for one of his best-known symphonies, (with a title suggested by Thurber, it is said),[citation needed] "From the New World".

Burleigh went on to assist Dvorak in copying sections of his work as his amanuensis, and ultimately became a well-known baritone and composer in his own right, as well as a faculty member at the Conservatory.

In addition to race and gender issues, Thurber championed the idea of a federally-funded conservatory and was very pointed about the fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation that did not provide government monies for the arts.

"[9] Scholars suggest it could be because the school had been pigeon-holed as being "specifically successful in helping students of foreign birth and certain special classes, like the blind and those of Negro blood".