Composer and pianist Margaret Bonds grew up in a musically rich environment in Chicago—her mother was a gifted organist, and in high school Bonds studied piano and composition with Florence Price. Like Price, Bonds was a pathbreaker. In 1934, she became the first Black soloist to play with the Chicago
Born in Peoria, Illinois, Mary Turner Salter went to high school just across the Mississippi River in Burlington, Iowa, before moving east to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She was a gifted mezzo-soprano and pianist, and she sang professionally in Boston and New York
The composer and pianist H. Leslie Adams has had a long and illustrious career. Now in his nineties, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. Adams studied voice, piano, and composition at Oberlin College and went on to earn a master’s degree in music from the California State University
Josephine Lang was a prolific composer of songs. She was born into a deeply musical family—her father was a violinist and her mother (who first taught her piano) was an opera singer—and she showed a talent for composition at a very young age. Felix Mendelssohn gave her lessons in harmony
Mary Howe was an American pianist and composer. In 1922, at the age of forty, married with three children, she completed an artist diploma in composition at Peabody Conservatory with Gustav Strube. Having studied piano in Germany at a young age, she returned to Europe to study composition with Nadia
Lili Boulanger had a tragically short life. She died at age twenty-four from intestinal tuberculosis, and spent much of her life in poor health, having contracted pneumonia as a toddler, which compromised her immune system. Still, in those twenty-four years she produced a wide variety of remarkable compositions, including many
The music by these composers has not been recorded very often, in some cases not at all. This is why one of the purposes of the ASA is to offer quality video recordings of this overlooked repertoire.
Fanny Hensel’s op. 1 (a collection of six songs) was published in the summer of 1846, less than a year before she died of a stroke at the age of 41.
Marie Vespermann appeared in public concerts as young as age nine and began composing songs at age twelve.
Marie Franz composed a stirring setting of Goethe’s poem “Meine Ruh ist hin,” which is even more turbulent than Franz Schubert’s immortal 1814 setting of the same text — “Gretchen am Spinnrade.”
Mary Wurm was a gifted piano teacher. In 1914, she published a collection of music designed for the teaching of preschool-age children, The ABCs of Music (Das ABC der Musik).
Stephen Rodgers is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. Rodgers’s research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially art songs by underrepresented composers.
