Founders Day Message

Mu Phi Epsilon was founded on 13 November 1903. This Founders Day, our fraternity will be 121 years old. That means we are older than the National Broadcasting Company (1926) or General Motors (1908). We’ve been around longer than synthetic plastics (1907), commercial aviation (1910), or antibiotic drugs (1928). Mu Phi Epsilon has outlasted hearing music on the Victrola, the LP hi-fi, the cassette Walkman, the CD player, and the iPod.

Our longevity can make us feel like a venerable institution: Solid. Stable. Maybe even stodgy. If we think that, however, we forget that the existence of Mu Phi Epsilon represents one success of a profoundly radical idea—an idea as old as our nation and yet as new as this moment, expressed in this triennium’s theme as “Together in Harmony” but long known to all Americans as “E pluribus unum.”

Just as music has grown to embrace a whole spectrum of pitches and elements that once were considered outside the harmony, our notion of the elements integral to our American society has progressed since the time when the full rights of citizenship applied only to property-owning white males. We musicians are never going back to the medieval idea that thirds are dissonant and major triads have no place in perfect harmony, and our nation cannot backslide on the inclusion of all our people—women, people of color, many waves of immigrants and indigenous people too, LGTBQ+ individuals, and those with disabilities—in the “pluribus” of our American “unum.”

Mu Phi Epsilon has played its role in these developments. It was a radical act for Winthrop Sterling and Elizabeth Mathias to found an organization for professional musicians with 13 young women who in 1903 had no legal right to vote or get a bank loan without a male co-signer. It was a radical act for Mu Phi Epsilon to embrace and support Ruth Watanabe when her neighbors were being sent to internment camps during World War II. In 1977, it was a radical act when Mu Phi Epsilon rejected the idea of excluding members on the basis of sex and thus became the first professional music fraternity open to members of every sex and sexual orientation. On this Founders Day, I invite us all to celebrate and honor not only our Founders, but all the people who have joined “Together in Harmony” to build everything we now value so deeply.

Kurt-Alexander Zeller
International President