by Undine Smith Moore
as published in the IAWM Journal, February 1997, pp. 9-15.
The late composer and teacher, Undine Smith Moore, was born in 1904 in Jarrat, Virginia, and died in 1989 in Petersburg, Virginia. She obtained her B.A. and B. Music degrees from Fisk University, graduating with honors; she was the first Fisk student to be awarded a scholarship from the Juilliard School of Music. She continued her studies at Juilliard, Eastman and Manhattan Schools of Music and earned an M.A. and a professional diploma in music from Columbia University. In 1972 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Virginia State College and a second one from Indiana University in 1976. She joined the faculty of Virginia State College in 1927 where she taught for 45 years and cofounded and codirected the Black Music Center with Altona Trent Johns. She composed piano, vocal, chamber and choral music including sacred works and many arrangements of spirituals that were published by Witmark. She was often referred to as the "Dean of Black Women Composers." It is appropriate to honor her at any time for her contributions to composition and teaching but especially during February, Black History Month. (by Jeannie Pool)
A keynote address delivered to the First National Congress on Women in Music, March 27, 1981 at New York University
Greetings to all of you and thank you for the honor and privilege of being here. I'm already very stimulated. It's fine to reflect that when those who come after us read of the First National Congress on Women in Music, they will know that we were all here....I have had the tremendous joy and privilege of studying the great art of music, of trying to be a musician all my life, and I have taught 50 years....
I have thought of various titles and approaches to my talk this morning. A first fleeting idea suggested some adaptation from Richard Henry Dana's old book of travel and adventure, Two Years Before the Mast. Why not Fifty Years with the Chords of the Augmented Sixth? But this was obviously too limited. The First National Congress on Women in Music deserves something more erudite, even before the onset of the scholarly papers. Perhaps some borrowing or approximation of Proust, a sort of Reflections on Things Past, Reflections on Things to Come. Though you need not expect erudition, and I will try not to be pontifical, I do wish to think along these lines, and I choose to do so in spite of Lillian Hellman's caution that any sentence that begins, "I remember..." is already too long.
It is a long way from Jarrat in Southside Virginia [an area of small towns that were predominantly African American] where I was born, to this room at New York University. The power of things we heard when we did not know we were hearing, of the things we saw when we did not know we were seeing, is remarkable, a source of continuing wonder, and it is rightly the subject of much current study. Though I left Jarrat when I was about three, I remember now songs and sounds that I had already absorbed. The singing at the Morning Star Baptist Church and the praying. I remember quite specifically not only "Go Down Moses" but also "Bringing in the Sheens." I heard the word "sheens" instead of "sheaves" and though I sang both tunes correctly, I thought that that word was some reference to the sewing machines. My mother had one.
I remember the weeping as we went across the fields to see cousin Johnny-"Cousin Johnny dead"-the nearest cousin, the clock stopped. My aunts dressed in black with long veils, but dancing in a corner, dropping deeply and rising rhythmically from the floor-Aunt Sarah with her hair always corn rowed. The timbre of the voices of my aunts passing the farm at night, giving their special hollers.
Such things heard and not heard, seen and not seen, are lodged deeply in us. And the place in us where they are lodged is also the place from which our creativity comes. About five or six years ago, in the archives of the Library of Congress, I sat listening to a recording of early blues and hollers. Suddenly, I found myself weeping, weeping almost to the point of embarrassment. The timbre of the voices of my aunts had come to me from some place deep in myself which I did not know existed.
The details I have mentioned are an essential part of me. Everyone has similar experiences though they are, of course, for all of us highly individualized. These things are at the heart of our uniqueness, our special selves. All artists must create out of themselves, and one of the ways we can help ourselves to grow is to let ourselves be open to experience, to let (notice "let," not "force"), to let ourselves be sensitive, be aware, to follow what we feel within us while we develop those more outward techniques which are also essential to our art.
As a woman, as a Black woman, as a musician, I think the town of Petersburg was a good choice for me when my family decided to leave Jarrat. Viewed objectively by its obvious limitations, one might question Petersburg as a good place for a musician to grow up. What did Petersburg have? In the first place, the lives of Black people in Petersburg were saturated with music of one kind or another. Barred from the theaters and all but the gallery of the Academy of Music, children went with their elders from church to church. There was the wonderful singing, the unquestioned assumption, perhaps from Africa, that all would join in, old, young, regardless of voice. In the congregation, the concept of an error did not exist. A child could not fail to observe the unrivaled status that a leading singer at church enjoyed. Besides, there was a veritable fascination with piano study. A person walking along the street carrying a music roll, that is a leatherette forerunner of the attache case, walked proudly. This was clearly a person of culture, affluent enough to pay Miss Patty Campbell one dollar a month for eight lessons.
The progress of children was inquired about in the community and noted with pleasure. The favorite question asked to test advancement of children (in this instance, more often girls than boys) was "You playing sheet music yet?" There was never a lack of places to perform on whatever level one was able-the Sunday school, the church, the church socials and suppers. Petersburgers, in the days of my childhood, were deeply involved in what they called the silver tea. Dramatic pieces were spoken, delectable foods were served, but above all else, music reigned.
Motivation is a much used word these days. Educators regard it as an extremely important factor in growth. Consider the quality of motivation in the life I have described. To live in a society where one's favorite art is highly regarded, highly valued, where one's progress is a source of pride to the family and the entire community is enough to create in a child a fine sense of self-worth and a high level of aspiration.
When I graduated from the local high school, where the teachers were extraordinarily thorough and dedicated, I had done well enough to choose to concentrate in any one of several areas, but the thought of being anything other than a musician never once crossed my mind. This feeling about music had become strongly reinforced several years earlier when Lillian Allen Darden, a graduate of Fisk and classmate of Roland Hayes, had come to town. Her arrival was a major event in the town, as well as in my own life. Now, the range of music performed and heard was much broader and one's enjoyment could be enhanced by the development of a solid technique. It was a proud day in my life and in the life of the entire community....
In view of the general nature of our meeting, this meeting, it may not be out of place for me to point out that this rich musical and social life in the town as I have recalled it was largely initiated and nourished by women. They held power in the church [and] in the community. It was a power that was recognized [and] so commonly assumed that it was not even discussed. But it was, nevertheless, a power confined to certain areas that never even suggested the quality of authority enjoyed by men in running the affairs of the church and the social group. Women could and did influence the building of a school, the choice of teachers [and] the order and content of the church service, but there must have been a subtle etiquette that kept them in a particular place.
Further, so far as I know, the influence of women on the music and the culture in the life of the Black community, while known and applauded, was rarely, if ever, documented in any written form. In the history of Gilfield Church, my own church, established in 1789, a history written by the able scholar Luther Porter Jackson, there is little reference to women. The photographs and documents emphasize the contributions of the ministers [and] the deacons, whose lives are discussed in detail. Surely, there exists some need, even at this present time, to revise the approach to written history. Let me digress to say that one looks forward to a time when the history of music will be more inclusive, when all of the dispossessed-Blacks, women and, indeed, Americans who constitute a veritable salon de raison-will find an earned place in the written record.
Obviously, I write about these early days with love. No doubt the picture of childhood satisfaction which I have drawn has excluded some sharp and bitter memories, bitter experiences, particularly those related to the powerlessness of our race. The fact that these ugly memories do not loom so large is not an accident. It is a tribute to the determination of Black parents, my parents, to create for their children, as far as possible at home and in the community, a haven so fortified with love and support that assault from the larger, dominant group could not pierce their armor. Further, the joys I have described are evidence of the ability of Black people to live life with gusto in the midst of oppression, to survive, even flourish in situations that often were designed to humiliate them. [William] Faulkner's books and characters now run together in my mind, but I remember well a passage in which he comments on this. Black servants and white masters, having looked forward to the coming of the carnival, have at last arrived at the merry-go-round. Whites could pay, could ride, but Faulkner notes that "the Blacks, not allowed to ride, stood on the ground outside looking with a quality of enjoyment never experienced by the riders."
Let me say a word about Fisk, my undergraduate college. The Fisk of my time was a place of excellence not to be believed. The great DuBois, and others like him, had left their intellectual stamp. There were before us the Jubilee Singers, Roland Hayes, Roy Tibbs [and] Augustus Larson; there was Sophia Boat, who as early as that made herself a distinguished career as a lawyer in Chicago. There was Althea Edmonston, missionary to Africa. It seems that everyone that I knew at Fisk read music [and] played an instrument. Many had come to major in music. Unable to reach the celestial standards of admission set by three maiden ladies from Oberlin, they had changed their majors but remained to enrich the community musical life. Here, boys played the piano, too, and girls like Sonoma Tally and Lydia Mason, who went on to Juilliard, played with a mastery removed from the false conception of music for a girl as a social grace designed merely to ornament the life of her husband. It must be said that in my experience, this concept of the woman pianist never seemed to dominate the Black community as it did more Anglo-Saxon groups. Still, even here at Fisk, the role of the musician for both boys and girls was narrowed by the racism of the time so that motivation toward composition and conducting was scarcely commensurate with the level of student talent. Perhaps the figure of a composer and a conductor were too largely perceived by the society as symbols of authority.
Nevertheless, at Fisk, where I had won the first scholarship to be given by Juilliard for study at Fisk, I was also considered to have talent as a composer. I had made up music all my life, been frustrated around eight or nine because when I tried to make a canon, I didn't know the "word." I could never make it fit all the way to the end. At Fisk, my works were performed on programs of original compositions as they were to be performed later when I was a student at Columbia. I remember at Fisk a large work for women's chorus, Sir Olaf and the Erl King's Daughter. I have a comment to make about that later. In both institutions, I wrote much [Leopold] Godowsky [1870-1938] sounding music for the piano. I kept writing always, but thought of myself first as a pianist. The shift in my view of my own role came later, after I achieved some maturity following graduate school. Then I began to feel myself a composer [and] a teacher. I came to identify myself as I do now: I am a teacher who composes, rather than a composer who teaches.
I have been asked to comment on my beliefs related to the role of women composers in the twentieth century. Let me say at the outset, I believe that the role of women in music will be enormously expanded. From what I have heard this morning, it is already expanded. I believe that acceptance of a change in the role of women and the removal of limitations in our society have profound implications for the woman as artist, the woman as musician. Since all liberation is connected, the Black woman musician will have with other women the results of this societal change. Men, too, will profit. Whenever any group achieves any kind of liberation, those who have participated in their former condition, I almost said "condition of servitude," also gain freedom or release.
I believe the reasons women musicians have seemed, or perhaps been, fewer in number as compared to women poets [or] women novelists is a complex matter involving many factors. I believe the scholars who are coming have brought the answers with them. The relative absence of women as conductors, women as composers, is of special interest to me, and I repeat, as I have just said, that the conductor and the composer are, to a greater extent than the performer, authority figures and, as such, it is not strange that opportunities for women as well as Blacks have been limited. This limitation includes the effect on the aspiration of women who in their childhood and youth have been able to observe few examples to inspire them with belief in their own power. This is changing and will change more each year.
There is an addition-the fiction of woman's inability to deal with the abstract. Because music is an utterly non-verbal art, there is inevitably a certain quality of the abstract in the approach to the composer's art. Women, for a long time in the past, were indoctrinated with the widely held belief that the abstract is not their sphere. They have been forced to deal with the minutia of life, often in a manner that freed men to be the creators. The passing of the fiction of woman's inability to deal with the abstract will also increase the number of women composers. Another passing fiction with which women have been indoctrinated is the belief that the peculiar nature of their attitudes and response to emotion prevents them from converting their inner experience into art. Over and over, it has been held that the objective discipline which is necessary to transmute inner sources by giving them artistic form is a discipline suitable only to men....
As I approach the end of my remarks, I am going to quote my own answers to a few of the extensive and penetrating questions asked me in an interview which became the basis of my share in the book, The Black Composer Speaks, edited by David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, and Herman C. Hudson.
The question I am going to begin with, though it is near the end of what they ask, is "Has your style changed across the years? If so, why? What influenced these changes?" I referred a while ago to my writing of a large work for women's voices at Fisk, Sir Olaf and the Erl King's Daughter. I don't know whether my teacher, Sarah Light, was Scandinavian or not. She gave me the poem and I was a dutiful student. I said [in reply to the questions]:
It takes some maturity for many people to realize that whatever is extremely familiar in one's life may be the subject of creative expression. That happens in...music in much the way that young writers of fiction or poetry often pass through periods of writing about strange, exotic, far away things before they realize that their daily life is a secure source, what they really know and really feel.
After my master's degree at Columbia, I seemed to realize how deeply touched I was by the fragments of spirituals sung by my mother and father around the house, how much the spirituals sung at Fisk were a part of me. I began writing down the melodic fragments sung by my family from Southside Virginia. I can see my mother resting in her bed, and I would draw up a chair with my manuscript pad to write as she sang. I was struck at the time that many of these melodies were not heard [any longer]. When I did this recording, I did not have any specific purpose for further use. There may have been some vague but certainly undefined idea. It was not conscious. I will say, however, that this experience became a part of everything that I have done. When I write for the piano, it doesn't sound like Godowsky any more.
Another question that was asked me, "Given unlimited time and finances and no restrictions whatsoever, what would you write?" At the time I answered this, I said:
I wish this question had been asked me ten years ago. I would like even at this point to be able to explore the possibilities of other than conventional sound sources. I would wish to write music of good quality, interesting and fresh, yet within the performance possibilities of the thousands of performers and groups for whom there must be a continuing repertoire. The masses of amateur choirs, school groups, church groups, etcetera deserve a less banal repertoire of choices. To satisfy this need would, in my opinion, be an entirely worthwhile project. Was it Fauré who told his famous students at the Paris Conservatory, "Don't try to write a masterpiece every day"?
The next question to which I'll respond, "If given the opportunity, would you choose to devote yourself to composition on a full-time basis? Why or why not?" At the time, my answer was:
Trying to teach what I can about the great art of music, to stimulate students to realize what potentialities they have which often they do not realize, and what opportunities are now open to them is extremely satisfying to me. I experience teaching itself as an art, and I have found it to have a valuable reciprocal relation to the art of composition. As long as I am able, I would like to do both.
Because performers are so often urged into teaching for the wrong reasons, you know, so you'll have something to fall back on.
I wish to comment...a little bit further about teaching. Teaching has been a tremendously important activity in my life. A number of my students hold eminent positions. I am proud of the fact that when we were observed by the committee from the National Association of Schools of Music for entrance into that association, my students were so wonderful. I thought they were wonderful, and so did the examiners. They commented on them as alert students taught by a stimulating and inspiring teacher. I had the pleasure of teaching many students who have come to national positions. There are so many of them that I'm not going to even begin to read their names. I will comment on...some of them at the time of my retirement: Billy Taylor; Camilla Williams, the first Black women to sing opera with a major company; Leon Thompson, formerly of the New York Philharmonic; [and] Philip Medlin, a publisher [who] gave me a tremendous gift at Town Hall. All of my students and friends came, and the evening was devoted to a performance of my music which they had prepared.
I am kept busy because enough time has passed so that my distinguished students are now the heads of music departments and the heads of schools of fine arts, and they invite their old teacher to come and speak. Many of them have written theses and dissertations on me. I think the earliest was done at the Eastman School of Music and University of Michigan, and the latest two were done at Cincinnati and I believe here at New York University. When I read some of these, I said to my daughter last night that the description of my life is so glowing that I think, "These writers are going into fiction."
But to get back a bit, I digressed because I want to stress the importance of teaching. I was responding to the question, would I devote myself and talent to composition, and I was saying that I enjoyed the two things together. It would be fine to have a life ordered so that everyday responsibilities did not impinge so heavily on my time. I am a widow of restricted means, living in a fairly large house which must be managed. The simple availability of a part-time typist or office assistant or a cleaning assistant would be an almost ideal way for me. I wrote at that time:
This question was surely written for men. Their wives so often assume those dreary responsibilities which makes it possible for them to compose. Even the many male composers who do not marry in order to avoid these responsibilities often have some kind of liaison with a woman who relieves them of these matters.
I was asked to comment on the role and the position of the Black artist. I would speak firstly of position, and this is not related just to Blacks, it's everybody:
The artist is not highly valued in American society. And from what I read in the newspapers from day to day, now, I don't think it's being advanced. Of this group, Blacks are at the bottom. The Black will have less time to write, to create. The Black will find greater difficulty getting his work printed, recorded, performed. The Black will be omitted from so-called serious texts of books and lists of music, will get comparatively little money, which means that while the position may be very slowly improving, in general, the lot is not very different from that of others of his kind in any comparative scale.
I may say that though I have stressed [the Black artist], because I was asked...to talk about Blacks, I think that for certain reasons for a while it will continue to be true of women. With regard to the role of the artist, I had written:
The primary function of any artist in any period is to convey as honestly and as sincerely as he can his personal vision of life. Since the artist belongs to the most sensitive segment of any society, a Black composer in contemporary America, aware of his own plight and that of his people, can scarcely avoid some expression reflecting these conditions. Without positing a social purpose as a requirement of art, he cannot really escape expressing his heritage somewhere in the body of his work. This expression in the hands of the gifted artist can be powerful.
I think of the powerful social change in a work like Picasso's Guernica. I think of the refusal of Pablo Casals to play, though courted by dictators. And I think of Marian Anderson not marching and joining ordinary protest movements, but, nevertheless, opening up the doors of Constitution Hall. I think of a woman like Natalie Hinderas who by the very perfection of her playing is an agent of social change. And I think that a meeting such as this, and such as the activities which have gone before, these are tremendous forces for social change, and they should be kept in the minds of musicians.
I was asked, "What major works are in progress?" I will tell you that the difference between what one hopes to do and the achievement of that end is so great that I am happy to answer this question this morning. At the time it was asked, I said:
Like everyone else able to hold a pen, I have been asked to do a large work on Martin Luther King. The piece is in what I call a period of germination. I have a vague idea that it will be called something like "Scenes From the Life of a Hero" or perhaps "Scenes From the Life of a Martyr." I think perhaps the text will come from a variety of sources. I will write some of it myself. Perhaps there will be a large orchestra, a narrator, orchestral accompaniment, soloists.
I am happy to announce that I have finished that work. And I have had tremendous support and encouragement from the Richmond Symphony, which is a good symphony and highly valued in Virginia, and they are doing it in their next season, which is one of their anniversary seasons. And it is to be done in New York, and I'm not going to announce the date, but I'm going to invite you.
And now, the last question, "What advice would you give a young composer?" This was addressed to the Black composer, but I really think that it's good for anybody, as is often the case with art: "The young Black composer should listen to all the varieties of music possible." Let me interrupt to say I have experimented with saying "he or she" and I am going to ask you, when I say "he" to forgive me and to note that I am talking about all of us.
This aspiring composer should perform, should study many instruments. He should master as thoroughly as possible the details of music as a craft. He should develop his musicianship to the fullest. He should let his life and his senses be stimulated by other arts: painting, sculpture, dance, literature, drama, architecture. He should know some poetry, history, philosophy. He should value the opportunity to direct or perform in amateur groups which may include all races. He should initiate such groups, if possible. Besides rendering a service, he will find through this practice the limitations, the advantages, the unique possibilities, and the problems of various voices and instruments. Above all, he should remain close to his people, sharing their thoughts, feelings, and anxieties. These are part of the roots which nourish him and strengthen him. He should be aware of the possibilities for social change which may result from his art. He should remember that it is the whole person who creates.
When I came up, it was the fashion for composers to close their pieces with codas and codettas. And so I am going to have a coda and a small codetta, which to some extent describe the attitude to life that I have cultivated. These are some things that help me in those moments of fear and self-doubt, those moments, I believe it was Paul Tillich [1886-1965] who called them his demons. I may forget these, but what I'm going to say is so well known that you just join in in carrying me across.
Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world. Sitting well in order, strike the sounding furl for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all of the western stars until I die. It may be that the waves will wash us down. It may be that we shall reach the happy isles and see the great Ulysses whom once we knew. Although we are not such strength as in old days moved heaven and earth, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic heart made weak by time and faith but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
And the codetta from my people, the old people who said, "Stay in the field. Stay in the field, children, until the war is ended."
Baker, David N., et al. The Black Composer Speaks. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1978.
"Rare Treat for Retiree: Adieu by Concert." Clavier 11 (November 1972): 43.
Cohen, Aaron I. "Undine Smith Moore," in International Encyclopedia of Women Composers. 2nd ed. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981.
Harris, Jr., Carl. "Conversations with Undine Smith Moore," Black Perspectives in Music 13 (Spring 1985).
Press, Jacques Cattell, ed. Who's Who in American Music. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983.
Williams, R. Ora, ed. American Black Women in the Arts and Social Sciences: A Bibliographic Survey. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Revised and enlarged ed., 1978.
Patterson, Willis. Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers. New York: E. B. Marks, 1977.
Taylor, Vivian, ed. Art Songs and Spirituals by African-American Women Composers. Bryn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing Co., 1995.
Walker-Hill, Helen, ed. Black Women Composers: A Century of Piano Music (1893-1990). Bryn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing Co., 1992.
LP recordings on Eastern Ers 513, 542, 549; Richsound 4112 N. 10; University of Michigan School of Music SM 0015; Mark Records MC 8458.
This speech was prepared for publication by Jeannie Pool, coordinator of the First National Congress on Women in Music. (This year, Pool is coordinator of the Tenth International Congress on Women in Music to be held May 29 to June 1 at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA.) Pool invited Undine Smith Moore to give the keynote address and to participate in the first conference's session on Black Women in American Music, chaired by music critic Raoul Abdul. A cassette tape of this speech is available from Jeannie Pool Productions, P.O. Box 8192, La Crescenta, CA 91224-0192 for $9.95, including postage and handling. Special thanks to Stephen M. Fry for his assistance and to Lenore Coffman for doing the tape transcription.