Female American Composers
A History of American Women Who Were Celebrated Composers
Women have been composing for centuries but some were more successful than others. History should remember these women and their musical works.
In past centuries the United States has produced many talented female composers, some of whose compositions can still be heard in concert today. Here are a few notable examples.
Marjorie Dudley
Marjorie Eastwood Dudley (1891-1963), was stricken with polio at the age of 6, which left her physically handicapped for life. This did not stop her from earning the Mus.B. degree in piano from Northwestern University; Mus.B and Mus.M. from the Chicago Musical College in composition; the certificate in composition from the Conservatoire Americaine, Fontainbleau and Mus. D. in composition from the University of Toronto, Canada.
Dudley became a professor of music at the College of Fine Arts, University of South Dakota, from 1920 to 1956. Her many compositions include piano pieces, songs, 6 symphonies (performed by the Chicago Civic Orchestra and the Rochester, NY, Civic Orchestra) and a piano concerto performed by the Symposium of American Music, Minneapolis.
Mary Howe
Mary Howe as born in Richmond, Virginia in 1882 and died in 1964. She studied at the Peabody Conservatory with Ernest Hutcheson in piano and composition with Strube. She wrote many works that were published and performed in her lifetime.
A list of her compositions would include Spring Pastoral, for solo violin and 13 instruments; Stars and Whimsy, for 15 instruments; Agreeable Overture; Rock, a symphonic poem (performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1955); Castellano, for 6 pianos and orchestra; Dirge, for orchestra and choral works. She was published by Boston Music Co., G.Schirmer; Ditson; Mercury and others.
Clara Korn
Clara Anna Gerlich Korn was born in 1866 and died in 1940. She was a native of Germany but was brought to the United States at an early age, and received her education in the New Jersey school system, where she later taught. She was advised by Tchaikowsky to concentrate on composition and in 1901 was awarded a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music in NYC, where she studied with B.O.Klein, Horatio Parker and Antonin Dvorak.
From 1893 to 1898 she taught theory at the conservatory and later she was elected head of the piano department at the DeBauer School of Music and Languages in NYC. Her compositions include a violin suite; a symphonic poem, Morpheus, 2 suites for orchestra; a piano concerto; an opera, Our Last War and a piano sonata.
Edith Noyes
Edith Rowena Noyes was born in 1875 and had a career as a pianist. She studied composition with Edward MacDowell, theory with George Chadwick and counterpoint at the New England Conservatory.
She toured Europe as a piano soloist in 1899 and 1919, playing programs of American music only. Her compositions include a piano trio; a violin sonata; an operetta, Last Summer (performed at Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1898), and a romantic pageant-opera based on an Indian subject Waushakum (Framingham, Massachusetts, 1917).
Source:Women of Notes:1,000 Women Composers Born Before 1900, Richards Rosen Press, Inc., NYC, 1978
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