As I was preparing for a lesson this afternoon, I noted in some surprise that not only was the study I was going to be teaching by a female composer, but by a female composer I’d not heard of.
Born May 18 (30), 1874, in Rostov-on-Don; died June 4, 1967, in Moscow. Soviet pianist and teacher. Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR (1935).
Gnesina graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1893 as a piano student of V. I. Safonov and devoted herself to teaching. She was a founder and director of Gnesin’s School of Music (from 1895) and Gnesin’s Music Pedagogic Institute (from 1944), where she worked as artistic supervisor and professor. As a teacher Gnesina developed the finest traditions of the Russian school of piano. Her students included the pianist L. N. Oborin and the composer A. I. Khachaturian. She was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.
Hello, all! Apologies for the delay between History Hunt posts. My studio continues to grow, which is great news for me, but makes it hard for me to find time to do the research for these posts. I’ll keep trying to make them as regularly as I can, though, because the History Hunt series is very important to me.
So, this week, we’re going to be meeting our second musical Anna Amalia–our first was Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, who I featured last summer. Unfortunately, up-to-date information about this Anna Amalia is sparse at best and inaccessible at worst, and so I’ll have to rely on old sources. This means that, though I’m doing my utmost to ensure this post is accurate as always, not having access to newer scholarship means some of my information may be outdated.
Also, please note that child neglect and misogyny are discussed in this post.
Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar was born a princess on October 24, 1739 in Wolfenbüttel, in what’s now Germany. She was her parents’ ninth child, but sadly, rather than being excited to welcome another member of their family, her parents were disappointed that she was a girl. They neglected her terribly in favour of her older siblings, which left Anna deeply unhappy.
Even her teachers treated her poorly, something she didn’t at all deserve. Eventually, with no one to turn to, she devoted herself to learning in order to bring herself happiness. Luckily, there were a great many musicians and artists at the court of her father, Duke Charles I (also known by his German name of Karl I). She took music lessons from a professor at Collegium Carolinum, a university her father founded.
When she was sixteen, she married Duke Constantine of Weimar in an arranged marriage. However, in spite of what’s usually thought about arranged marriages, this was a great relief for Anna. She saw it as a way out of her unhappy home, and so she gladly married the eighteen-year-old Duke and moved to Weimar to become its new Duchess.
Life in Anna’s new home was hard at first, as Weimar was much poorer than the household in which Anna grew up. The arts weren’t valued nearly as much in Weimar as they were in her old home. Still, she kept her chin up and persevered.
Sadly, when Anna was eighteen, her husband died of illness. Because their son was still an infant, this left her ruling Weimar in his stead, first with a fellow guardian, and then, once she was twenty-one, alone.
Anna had a long road ahead of her: Weimar was in tough shape and had little money. However, that didn’t discourage her. She was used to studying, and so she started learning about how to run a duchy as soon as possible. Though it took years, she brought Weimar back to its former riches. She also encouraged artists, musicians, writers, and actors to come to her court. Some of the most famous artists of her day soon arrived, putting Weimar on the map as an important cultural centre.
It wasn’t only other people who made music around Anna, though. She was a composer herself, and though only a few of her pieces survive, one of them is the opera Erwin und Elmire, which she composed when she was about thirty-six. When writing this opera, she united two different opera styles with the traditional music of the area to create what’s been called “an important artistic milestone in the development of German Opera by a major historical figure in her own right.” (Tregear)
Nowadays, Anna is best known for the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, which she established personally, starting it off with around two thousand books. Even after a terrible fire in 2004, it still houses over a million volumes–including the published manuscript of her own opera. Though she’s no longer a well-known composer, her influence can still be felt to this day.
Here’s a sample of Anna’s music in the form of a trailer for her opera, Erwin und Elmire. More of the opera can be found by searching its title on Youtube.
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This week marks the 1st anniversary of History Hunt! Looking back, I’ve learned so much about musicians from all kinds of different places in history, from those who lived nearly a thousand years ago to musicians who are still alive and making music to this day. I’m so glad to have the opportunity to share the lives and music of these great people with you, and I’m looking forward to many more anniversaries!
For today’s History Hunt post, it’s time to visit another musician whose career is ongoing, someone who’s a woman of many talents.
Micki Grant was born as Minnie Perkins on June 30 in Chicago, Illinois. We don’t know the exact year of her birth, though it’s often quoted as 1941, because Grant doesn’t like to share it.
During her childhood, Grant recalls in an interview with the Dramatists Guild of America, there was always music in the air. This music was often blues music, such as W. C. Handy’s “Saint Louis Blues,” and was performed by her father, who had taught himself how to play the piano by ear. Grant would often sit on the piano stool beside her father and then improvise her own songs when he was finished.
When Grant was either six or eight years old, she played the part of the Spirit of Spring in a play at the community theatre. It was then, as she touched the flowers to make them come to life, that she decided she wanted to have a career in theatre when she grew up, and that same year she began taking acting lessons (for free!).
Later, when she was nine, she started taking violin lessons while her sister learned how to play the piano. Unfortunately, Grant was discouraged from taking piano lessons by her sister’s teacher, as the teacher believed she didn’t have the talent to play the piano–something that Grant soon proved wrong.
As she grew up, Grant took up other instruments. She learned to play the double bass, as there was a vacancy in a newly formed string orchestra that she volunteered to fill. Her violin teacher began teaching her how to play the instrument, even though Grant’s mother thought she was too small for it! She also learned to play the sousaphone in high school, another very large instrument. And, by the time she was sixteen or seventeen, she was directing the youth choir at church!
At this point, Grant wanted to become a famous novelist, though she knew she also wanted to work in theatre. How music would fit into her plans, she wasn’t sure just yet. Still, it remained a part of her life as she continued her education at three separate universities. At the University of Illinois, for example, she played in both the jazz ensemble and the concert orchestra, and when she studied double bass at the Chicago School of Music, she also played in its concert orchestra as well.
Though she spent some time in Los Angeles, it was in New York that Grant’s musical career really took off. On her own time, she learned to play the guitar (which she considers “a very friendly instrument”) and sang protest songs. Her paid work included singing in the off-Broadway plays The Blacks, Brecht on Brecht, and The Cradle Will Rock. In 1965, when she was twenty-four, thanks to her well-received musical theatre roles, she became one of the first African-Americans to land a role on an American soap opera, which was Another World. Almost right away, she became the first African-American to have a soap opera storyline written exclusively for her.
Grant wasn’t just interested in performing in musical theatre: she was also into writing plays and their music and lyrics. In 1970, she became the Urban Art Corps’ artist in residence and started what was to be a fifteen year-long collaboration with Vinnette Carroll, who was the first African-American woman to be a Broadway director. Together, they created Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, a Broadway musical that Grant also starred in. It was the first Broadway musical to be written solely by a woman, and when it finally closed, it was after 1065 performances–a huge success by any definition.
Throughout her career, Grant worked on numerous musicals, sometimes contributing the bulk of the work and at other times content to take the backseat. She’s also had fun writing music and lyrics for commercials, and for club singers. She’s won multiple awards over the years, including three Tony Awards, the NAACP’s Image Award, and the Dramatists Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the first woman to receive Grammy for Best Score for Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. And she’s had not one, but two “Micki Grant Day”s given in her honour: one in Brooklyn in 1990 and another in Newark, New Jersey in 1993.
Those of you who are lucky enough to find yourself in New York City between February 27 and March 6 will have the opportunity to see Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope for yourselves, put on by the York Theatre Company. If anyone goes, let me know how it was–I’d love to hear about it!
In the meantime, for those of us who won’t be able to make it to the performance, here’s the reprise of “I Gotta Keep Moving,” as sung by Micki Grant and Alex Bradford:
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This week (well…it was supposed to be last week, but I had a ton of errands), we’ll be meeting our second Canadian of History Hunt, someone who actually lived fairly near me! It was a really neat discovery for me, and I’m planning on going out of my way to introduce my music students to him as soon as I can track down some of his works.
Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in Drummondville (now a part of Niagara Falls), Ontario, Canada on October 11, 1882.
Ontario, Canada, birthplace of R. Nathaniel Dett
At first, Dett’s musician parents didn’t realise that their youngest son had inherited their gift, but that was soon to change. While two of his older brothers were receiving piano lessons, Dett began to copy them. He played their pieces–but without the sheet music they were using. When his brothers’ teacher found out, she was so impressed that she started teaching him for free!
When Dett was eleven, his family moved to the United States side of Niagara Falls. There, he continued his piano lessons and later, around when he was fourteen, he took a job as a bellhop at a local hotel. When he had the time, he would play the piano located in the lobby, which earned him more than a few fans.
The next year, in 1897, Dett made a decision. While he was setting up chairs in the hotel parlor for a visiting bass singer (who had actually been his Sunday School superintendent), he told himself that the next time he moved chairs, it would be for his own recital. Sure enough, later that summer, he was able to put on a piano recital in the same hotel parlor.
When he was sixteen, Dett became church organist at a church on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. In 1901, Dett began studying at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory of Music; two years later, he quit his job as church organist to join the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. There, he majored in both piano and composition, which would have been a tremendous amount of work. It also would have been expensive, but luckily, when Dett gave a benefit concert after his first year to raise money for his classes, one of the attendees was so impressed that he promised to help him pay for his lessons.
While Dett was at Oberlin, he heard a performance of Antonín Dvořák’s American quartet that changed the course of his life. This work for strings was composed using traditional folk songs, and as Dett listened, he remembered his grandmother, who had sung songs written by African-Americans while enslaved. Dett had never been comfortable with the reminders of such a terrible time those songs brought. But now, he became determined to keep the memory of these songs alive, so they wouldn’t fade away.
In 1908, Dett graduated from Oberlin, holding a Bachelor of Music degree with honours. He was the first Black person to earn this degree at Oberlin. That wasn’t the last time Dett studied music, though: he earned degrees and honourary degrees from universities all over the United States, including the highly prestigious Harvard University. By far, Dett’s biggest learning trip was to Paris, France, later in his life. There, he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the older sister of last week’s History Hunt composer, Lili Boulanger.
After Dett’s graduation, he began teaching at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. In 1911, he showed he was a man of many talents by publishing a book of poetry he dedicated to his mother. He spent the next few years teaching at two more universities and studying how to teach choirs, and then, in 1914, he gave two piano recitals that cemented his reputation as a composer and a pianist–one of which was at the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Club in Chicago, Illinois. (This club was named after a previously featured History Hunt composer, who you can read about here.) He also entered a composition contest that same year put on by the Music School Settlement of New York and came second.
During World War I, Dett wrote music to keep up the spirits of both Canadians and Americans alike. He also got married, in 1916, to Helen Elise Smith, who was the first Black person to graduate from the Damrosch Institute of Musical Art (which later became part of the famous Julliard School of Music).
After the war, Dett founded the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919, and was its president between 1924 and 1926. The next year, he published an essay in four parts called Negro Music, which was an analysis of the state of Black folk songs and how they might best be preserved. This essay won him a Bowdoin Prize from Harvard. These prizes are “some of Harvard’s oldest and most prestigious student awards” (Harvard); winning one was very significant indeed. He also won a Francis Boott prize from Harvard in the same year, this time for his composition “Don’t Be Weary, Traveller.” And, on top of that, later on, one of the groups to commission compositions from him was the TV station CBS, who asked for two separate symphonies!
After teaching at numerous universities, Dett settled at Hampton Institute in Virginia. There, he became the university’s first Black Director of Music by 1926 and united the university choir with local singers. With Dett at its head, the resulting choir went on numerous tours all across the United States and even to Europe and became very popular indeed. They performed in famous venues such as Carnegie Hall and Constitution Hall–the very same location that, eight years later, would refuse to allow Marian Anderson to perform for racist reasons. (See my History Hunt post on Marian Anderson for more information.)
Dett’s determination to preserve and help Black traditional music grow lives on even today. The Nathaniel Dett Chorale states on its website that it “is Canada’s first professional choral group dedicated to Afrocentric music of all styles, including classical, spiritual, gospel, jazz, folk and blues.” Dett would have been proud indeed.
Below is one of Dett’s most popular pieces from the suite In the Bottoms, “Juba,” which is based on traditional Black music and dance.
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Today is the 245th anniversary of Beethoven’s…baptism! We don’t know the exact date of his birth (historians guess it was probably December 16th), but we do have record of that, at least.
In honour of this anniversary, Google has posted a delightful musical doodle. Test your knowledge of Beethoven’s most famous works–and your ability to read music–on their main page. How did you do?
Apologies for missing last week’s History Hunt post, everyone! It was my last week of lessons and I had a fair bit of work to wrap up. Because of that, I hope to post two History Hunt biographies this week–fingers crossed!
For my first post this week, then, we’re moving back in time thirty years and off to France to learn about a composer who shone brightly for a far too short period of time.
Juliette-Marie Olga Boulanger (nicknamed “Lili”) was born in Paris, France, on August 21, 1893. Her family was an extremely musical one, with composers, teachers, and artists in her family tree. Her mother, who claimed to be a Russian princess (although whether she was, or if she was a countess or something else entirely is unclear), was a singer who had met Boulanger’s father when she took lessons from him later in life.
Unfortunately, when Boulanger was only two years old, she caught pneumonia. Like many illnesses, this wasn’t nearly as easy to treat as it is today, and so she nearly died. Though she survived, her illness left her much more susceptible to sickness, and she spent a lot of her life ill.
However, even as a little girl, Boulanger was determined to get the most out of life that she could. Her first teacher was her older sister Nadia (who will be a future History Hunt feature!), and she also learned from the famous composers that often visited the Boulanger household. She started tagging along to her older sister’s classes at the Paris Conservatory when she was five; by the time she was six, she was sight-reading music written by the famous French composer Gabriel Fauré! She learned not only how to sing, but how to play the piano, the harp, and the violin. Her first public performance on the violin was when she was eight, and she was eleven when she participated in her first piano recital.
When Boulanger was sixteen, she was at last able to properly join the Paris Conservatory. There, she took multiple composition classes. As a teenager, while Boulanger was of course dedicated to music and composition, she was also, like many her age, dedicated to having fun. She would often write in her diaries about who went to the various musical events and dinners she attended and how many people were there, with clear pleasure.
In 1911, Boulanger’s older sister, Nadia, once again became one of her teachers, this time for composition. A year later, Boulanger made an important decision: she was going to win the Prix de Rome (“Roman Prize”). In order to do so, she would need to work very hard indeed–in over one hundred years since the musical category of the Prix de Rome had been created, not one woman had won first prize. Boulanger, however, was convinced that she would be the first.
For the next year, she worked as hard as she could. In her diary, she wrote about being sick very often and even missing sleep as she worked on her composition. She studied for and passed the exam to the class that would allow her to enter the Prix de Rome. At the same time, though, she made sure to take breaks and enjoy herself, going out dancing, to concerts (where, for the first time, her compositions were performed), and to dinner.
Sadly, while Boulanger entered the Prix de Rome competition in 1912, she became too ill to participate and had to drop out. Still, Boulanger didn’t give up. She entered the contest again the next year, in 1913–and won! For the first time since the musical contest began 1803, a woman had placed first in the Prix de Rome. And, not only that, she was (and still is!) one of the youngest composers of any gender to win, at only 19 years old.
As part of her prize, Boulanger was awarded a publishing contract and she and her family were allowed to stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy. Unfortunately, her visit was cut short when, in 1914, World War I began. She returned to France and instead stayed in Nice for a while to compose, before going home to Paris. She and her sister wanted very much to help out their fellow musicians off fighting in the war. So together they helped create a committee of French and American volunteers to send care packages to their friends on the front lines and money to both soldiers and their relatives back home. Boulanger also helped care for wounded soldiers who had been sent away from the war front to recover, and she even edited a publication on recent composition lessons taught at the Paris Conservatory to send out to musicians so they could keep up their studies.
Though her wartime work kept her very busy and she was often sick, Boulanger kept on composing. In 1916, she started work on an opera called La princesse Maleine (“Princess Maleine”), and she visited the Villa Medici again for a time. She even started to experiment with new composition techniques.
Sadly, Boulanger died in 1918, when she was only twenty-four. Even still, she kept composing to the very end: her last work was dictated to Nadia when Boulanger was too ill to write herself.
For the rest of her life, Nadia did her best to make sure her younger sister wasn’t forgotten. She founded The Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, which awards money to help talented composers and musicians. There’s now a Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Centre, created from the merger between the Friends of Lili Boulanger Association and the Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Foundation. And, in 1927, nine years after Boulanger’s death, she had an asteroid named in her honour, 1181 Lilith. Lili Boulanger may be gone, but as long as we keep working hard, she won’t be forgotten.
Listen below to Boulanger’s Hymne au soleil (Hymn to the Sun), an extremely powerful vocal work she wrote when she was 19.
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We’re back in North America in the twentieth century this week to meet a soprano with a connection to an opera star previously featured on History Hunt!
Leontyne Price was born as Mary Violet Leontine Price on February 10, 1927 in Laurel, Mississippi. Her mother was an amateur singer well known for her beautiful voice and her father played the tuba. Both parents encouraged Price to follow her love of music from a young age. Price was given a treasured toy piano when she was three, started lessons on a full-sized piano when she was five (or possibly also when she was three, according to one source), and participated in her first recital when she was six years old. She also sang from an early age in the church choir, the way her mother did, and performed at school.
When Price was nine years old, something happened to change her life: her mother took her on a trip to Jackson, Mississippi to a very special concert. The star was none other than Marian Anderson, the first African-American person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Price was inspired by seeing an African-American opera star with a very successful career in spite of the racism of the time, and it was right then and there that she decided she wanted to be an opera singer, too.
Price worked hard at school as she grew up, both at her studies and her singing. She sang and played piano for her high school’s glee club, and she gave recitals and performed not just at school, but at church and in her community. When she graduated, it was with honours and a prize for “outstanding ability in music” (Nash).
Price knew that being an opera star isn’t easy. It’s often hard to make a living–and that was even more the case for an African-American woman in the 1940s. So when she went to university, she decided to get a music education degree as a fallback option. However, her voice teacher, Catherine Van Buren, encouraged her to take a chance and focus exclusively on her singing. That led Price to participate in a competition to earn a four-year scholarship to The Julliard School, a famous school of music–and she won the prize!
Though the scholarship money covered many of Price’s expenses, it still wasn’t quite enough. To fill in the gaps, Price was helped by Paul Robeson (a soon-to-be-featured History Hunt musician), who put on a benefit concert in which both he and Price participated. That concert raised $1000, which was a tremendous amount of money at the time. Price also received help from white musician Elizabeth Chisholm, who had often hired her in the past to sing at her concerts.
While studying at Julliard, Price sang in all kinds of operas put on by the school, and it was at one of these performances that her life once again changed. A composer named Virgil Thompson was so impressed by her that he offered her the role of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts. That meant at the age of 25, Price was singing on Broadway and in Paris in the first–but definitely not last–major role of her career.
Her next big career break was being offered the role of Bess, from the opera Porgy and Bess (which previous History Hunt musicians Ruby Elzy and Robert McFerrin, Sr. had participated in). For the next two years, Price toured all across the United States and Europe giving performances before returning to her home country.
When Price was 28, she was hired to star in a television production of the famous opera Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini. She was the first African-American person to appear on TV in an opera role, and even though twelve TV stations in the American South refused to show the program for racist reasons, the performance brought Price still more fame. It was the first of several TV opera performances for Price over the next five years.
Two years later, in 1957, Price made her debut on the opera stage in San Francisco in a brand-new opera called Dialogues des carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites). In the same year, with a bit of good luck for her and bad luck for another singer, Price was able to sing in one of the most famous operas in Western classical music: Aïda. The soprano who was supposed to sing the lead role became too sick to perform, and so Price stepped in–and was a huge success.
Even though Price had developed an international career, performing at famous venues like Covent Garden in London, England, and the Teatro alla Scala (nicknamed La Scala) in Milan, Italy, it wasn’t until 1961 that she at last was able to give her first performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. She was only the fifth African-American opera singer to participate in an opera there; her first (but definitely not last!) performance was in Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi, as the lead soprano. The audience for her debut was so astounded by her brilliance that they gave her a forty-two minute standing ovation!
Leontyne Price in costume for her starring role in Il Trovatore.
Price gave 204 performances at the Metropolitan Opera over the next twenty-four years as one of the opera company’s lead sopranos. She had a role created just for her in an opera commissioned by the Met, that of Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. From then on, Price was so famous that she could pick which roles she would play. She chose carefully, making sure not only that she wouldn’t be too busy and would have time to give recitals, but also to avoid harmful stereotypes about black people.
Over the length of her career, Price won between eighteen and over twenty Grammy Awards (sources differ) and was awarded a number of high honours, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Recorded Arts and Sciences. While she retired from the stage in 1985, her incredible singing hasn’t been forgotten, and she has a core of dedicated fans even thirty years after her farewell opera performance.
Below is a video of one of her performances in the role of Floria Tosca in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca:
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This week, we’re heading across the Atlantic Ocean to meet a composer who never stopped learning and trying new things throughout her very long life!
Germaine Tailleferre (born Germaine Taillefasse) was born on April 19, 1892 in Saint-Maur-des-Faussés, France. Like many of the composers and musicians we’ve met in this series, Tailleferre was interested in music from an early age and her interest was encouraged by her mother.
Unfortunately, as has also been the case far too often in History Hunt, Tailleferre’s father didn’t believe that becoming a composer was a “proper” thing for his daughter to do. It was up to Tailleferre’s mother to teach her how to play the piano and to encourage her daughter when she first began composing.
Tailleferre was only twelve when she went to study at the Paris Conservatory, without her father’s blessing or support. Two years later, when she won a prize for skill in solfège, her father started to think that maybe he had been wrong. But by then, Tailleferre had learned she could depend on herself just fine. Later, she changed her name from Taillefasse to Tailleferre, and continued with her studies.
By the time she was twenty, Tailleferre joined the active musical community in Paris and began studying orchestration. She spent the next three years winning first place in various competitions at the Paris Conservatory, for harmony and counterpoint, composition, and either accompaniment or keyboard harmony (sources disagree).
Between 1917 and 1918, Tailleferre’s circle of artist and musical friends expanded greatly. She was invited to participate in the first concert of the group “Les nouveaux jeunes” (“The New Young People”) after her piece for two pianos “Jeux de plein air” (“Outdoor Games,” or “Games in the Open Air”) was heard by one of the group members. Two years later, when Les nouveaux jeunes became “Les Six” (“The Six”), she was the only female member.
Les Six were considered some of the most important composers in France at the time. Although they didn’t actually compose much music together, they were leaders in composition and great friends, to the point where their children apparently still get together sometimes.
When Tailleferre was thirty-three, she married an American cartoonist known for his caricatures and moved to New York. Unfortunately, her new husband was of a similar mindset to Tailleferre’s father; he even went so far as to order her not to compose music for the movies of their friend, famous actor Charlie Chaplin.
Fortunately, Tailleferre had the opportunity to work on movie music after her divorce, working between the years 1931 and 1933. She also wrote an opera in 1931, although only the overture still survives. Even though she once again married a man who disliked the idea of women being professional composers in 1932, this time, Tailleferre didn’t let his disapproval slow her down. She kept on composing all throughout the 1930s and met with great success.
When World War 2 broke out, Tailleferre stayed in France for as long as she could, but as was the case with many composers during this time, she, her family, and her sister were forced to leave their home. They travelled first to Spain, then to Portugal, before finally arriving in the United States. With a growing daughter, Tailleferre didn’t have much time to compose, though when she went home to France a year after the war ended, she was able to work on her music more often. She worked in both film and radio music, as well as writing music on her own.
During the 1950s, Tailleferre briefly joined other composers who were experimenting with new musical techniques to break away from the traditions of Western Classical art music. In the end, though, she decided she preferred other sounds. She continued to write film music and opera, later worked as an accompanist to a dance studio, and, when she was 84 years old, she started teaching!
Throughout her long life, Tailleferre never stopped composing or reworking her old compositions. She proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re never too old to stop learning.
Listen below to “Romance,” a beautiful piano piece Tailleferre wrote when she was only twenty-one!
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This week, we’re moving forward in the 20th century to meet a composer who not only wrote for numerous popular TV shows, but collaborated with some of the biggest names of the 20th and 21st centuries!
Angela Morley was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England on March 10, 1924. Her parents were both amateur musicians: her mother sang (her favourite song being “Big Lady Moon” by previously featured composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor) and her father played the banjo ukulele.
Morley loved music from the very beginning of her life. Before she could read, she learned to change the records on the family gramophone by recognising the colour of the label, and her earliest musical memory was sitting on the floor, surrounded by records.
When she was eight years old, her father bought a piano and her mother arranged for Morley to take piano lessons. However, after only three months, Morley had to stop her lessons when her father died suddenly and she and her mother moved away to live with Morley’s grandparents.
Over the next while, Morley tried out several different instruments. She spent a month learning to play the violin, but her grandfather disliked the instrument, and after he buttered her bow as a practical joke, Morley stopped playing. When she was eleven, she took accordion lessons and even won a few competitions with her performance. Unfortunately, a judge for one of these competitions told her mother there was “no future” in a career as an accordionist. (Morley)
Though the remark was both poorly chosen and untrue, Morley gave up the accordion and began clarinet lessons on a cheap clarinet that only partly worked. In spite of not being able to afford a better instrument, she was able to join the school orchestra. While in the orchestra, the mother of one of Morley’s fellow students bought her an alto sax–and that was where things changed.
Morley started playing with a semi-professional dance band; by the time she was fifteen, she had quit school and was earning her living playing the alto sax. It wasn’t much money, but at least she was doing what she loved.
Soon after, World War II began, and that turned out to be a blessing in a very large disguise for Morley. During this time, many musicians were being drafted to fight in the war. Morley, however, was too young for the draft and by this time was skilled enough to easily replace any holes in a band’s lineup. She played all over England until, when she was seventeen, she joined the extremely successful Oscar Rabin Band as their lead alto saxophonist. She also began earning money by arranging music.
Three years later, Morley went from one highly popular band to another: The Geraldo Band. It was here that Morley’s arranging skills blossomed. The Geraldo Band played in all sorts of styles for BBC Radio, which forced Morley to stretch herself to accommodate the demands of radio.
With such high expectations of her, Morley began studying composition with Mátyás Seiber, a Hungarian composer. She also studied conducting with Walter Goehr. After all, since she was working with live musicians, it made sense for her to learn to conduct them.
By the time she was twenty-six, Morley had decided to stop performing so she could better concentrate on her composing and arrangements. Unlike many new composers, Morley had work right from the start. Within two years, she started ghost-writing film music; a year after that she became the music director of Phillips Records’ new UK branch. She began writing film music under her own name, and worked on not one, but two of the most popular shows of the 1950s: The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour! When she was ask to compose Hancock’s Half Hour‘s theme, she made it match the personality of the host–without ever having met him! She also worked with many of the great artists of the 50s, including Marlene Dietrich, Shirley Bassey, Mel Tormé, and Dusty Springfield.
In 1960, Morley had decided against working any more with film music. While recording technology had advanced tremendously during this time, film music in England, at least, had yet to take advantage of it. The sound quality of the music produced was so bad that Morley couldn’t stand working with it!
She changed her mind later in the decade and did her best to break back into the film industry. It took her until 1969, but in the end, she succeeded, writing scores for classics such as The Little Prince and Watership Down, the first of which earned her an Academy Award nomination!
1972 was a very important year for Morley. When she was born, her parents had assumed she was a boy and had given her a male name. However, they had made a mistake. Now, with the support of her wife, Christine, Morley was able to correct this mistake with gender confirmation surgery–sometimes incorrectly called “sex change surgery.”
While life these days can be very difficult for trans people, in the 1970s, there was even more prejudice among the general public. When Morley returned to the music community after a hiatus, she received a wide variety of reactions. Some were positive: when she went to retire from her current conducting position because she assumed she would no longer be welcome, one of her fellow musicians, Johnny Franz, convinced her to stay. Morley’s wife also remained married to her for the rest of their lives.
Some reactions, however, were negative. Many people were extremely rude and prejudiced against Morley and chose to be cruel. But Morley outlasted their ignorance and resumed her career. She continued to compose and, after moving to California, went on to collaborate with other composers–such as John Williams on Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back!
For the rest of her life, Morley continued to compose for important TV shows and movies, conducted, and collaborated with other composers. She worked on E.T., Dallas, Wonder Woman, and Home Alone, to name a few of her credits. She also wrote arrangements for famous musicians such as Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman and gave lectures on writing music for movies at the University of Southern California. And, thankfully, shereceived recognition for her work: she was nominated for six Emmys for her compositions and two Academy Awards overall, and won three Emmys for her arrangements.
Below is Morley’s “Rotten Row,” named after the location in Hyde Park where people historically went horse-riding. It sounds like the perfect song to listen to while on horseback!
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To Learn More (Sources): *Important note: Most of the sources discussing Morley involve misgendering, transphobia, or both. Exceptions are “A Profile of Angela Morley” and the autobiography on Morley’s site. Please tread carefully.
This week’s History Hunt post is unfortunately going to be lighter on details than many of the ones I’ve written lately. While up until now I’ve been fortunate to find a number of information sources for the majority of my History Hunt features, this week was a challenge. There’s very little information out there, and most of what there was needed to be pieced together by researchers–still more proof that celebrating our musicians and composers is extremely important.
Esther Louise Georgette Deer was born around 1891, give or take some months, at Akwesasne (also known as St. Regis Mohawk Reservation) in New York State. Her family was originally from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory in Québec, Canada.
When Deer was eleven, she joined The Famous Deer Brothers, Champion Indian Trick Riders of the World as a singer and dancer. This group was a travelling theatrical act founded by her father and uncle. She took the stage name Princess White Deer, and with her family, began performing in “Wild West” shows all over the United States. These shows presented a romantic version of the American west from the point of view of the white colonisers and were very popular during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Why would Deer and her family participate in shows that portrayed them as the “bad guys”? It’s a difficult question to answer. During this period in history, there were even more harmful stereotypes about First Nations people than there are today. It’s been suggested that both Deer’s family, and later Deer in her solo career, picked and chose which stereotypes to follow based on which would be most useful and, often, least harmful. By giving white audiences what they wanted, they were able to have a career and make a living, an option that would have only been achieved against tremendous odds if they had tried to break free completely from these stereotypes. It’s also been suggested that Deer may have found humour in her performances and laughed inside at her ignorant audiences!
That said, as historians, none of us have access to the thoughts of Deer and her family, and so these are only guesses made by looking back from a century later. Deer may have had other ideas in mind, and if so, they’re lost to history.
Regardless of their thoughts on their audiences, Deer and her family kept performing their acts. Some of the shows Deer participated in were Colonel Cummins Wild West Show at the Pan-American Exposition (a world’s fair that was part amusement park, part showcase of new technology) in 1901 when she was twenty, and the Texas Jack Wild West Show three years later.
The Deer Family must have been very popular and excellent performers, because in 1904 or 1905, they went on a world tour. They travelled throughout Europe and to South Africa, renaming their act to “The Deer Family Wild West Show.”
After five or six years of travelling with her family, when she was twenty-nine, Deer decided to part ways with them and start a solo career. She continued to travel all across Europe, and it’s rumoured that when she was in Russia in late 1913 or early 1914, a Russian prince fell in love with her and they were married. It’s hard to know if this is completely true, given how little information we have about Deer’s life, but it’s still possible!
When World War I started in 1914, Deer returned home to the United States. There, she used her music and dance talents to support the war effort by performing at war bonds rallies. At that time, the United States government was encouraging its citizens to invest their money in the government so they could afford to go to war, and Deer was one of many performers to help with this fundraising.
Deer also performed in vaudeville, or variety show, acts throughout the 1920s. She was considered “the most successful Mohawk entertainer of her generation” and “one of the most beautiful women in the world” (Galperin), and she gave her shows alongside a large number of famous entertainers of her era–including Harry Houdini!
It seems she had some difficulties in March 1921: I discovered a newspaper clip from the New York Times where Deer applied to have a restraining order against The Pictorial Review for using an image of “an Indian Princess,” possibly without her permission. I wasn’t able to turn up anything else about the story, including whether Deer was successful with her restraining order, but I hope she was.
As an artist in the 1920s, Deer performed a mix of stereotypical First Nations and “modern” (often white) acts, once more balancing what audiences demanded with the success of her career. For example, she created and performed in a production called From Wigwam to White Lights in 1925, and, like her family had done when she was young, she tended to mix clothing from different First Nations to be more appealing to her audiences. They weren’t coming to her shows expecting authenticity, after all. In the process, she used her lively performances to break down the stereotype of the “stoic” First Nations person.
Throughout her life, Deer used her fame to support various First Nations charities, such as the American Indian Defense Association. She even met President Roosevelt in 1937, to invite him and a Canadian delegation to a meeting of the Grand Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. She dedicated the community of Lake Mohawk to the Mohawk nation; in thanks, White Deer Plaza in that community was named after her and bears her name to this day.
Deer retired sometime before the start of World War II in 1939, but for the rest of her long life, she continued to work as an activist. I hope to have a chance to read more about Deer and her life someday. If I do, I’ll be sure to share it with all of you!
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Katherine Murley's Music Studio Blog 
