The Other Manuscript

Known as the ‘Dean of Black Female Composers’, Smith Moore was a Pulitzer Prize Nominated Composer, Activist, Renowned Teacher and Pianist.

Undine Smith Moore was an American composer, born on August 25th 1904 and passed February 6th 1989. When she spoke about her childhood she said, ‘above all else, music reigned’.

Her Pulitzer Prize nominated piece, Scenes from the Life of a Martyr, an oratorio based on the life of Doctor Martin Luther King, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1981. The piece was recently recorded by Detroit Symphony Orchestra and is free to hear from this link: https://livefromorchestrahall.vhx.tv/videos/undine-smith-moore-scenes-from-the-life-of-a-martyr

She co-founded and co-directed the Black Music Centre during her forty years teaching at Virginia State University, promoting black composers, lecturers and performers. She said aside from teaching, the Centre was her most significant accomplishment. She notably taught Camilla Williams, the first black woman to be signed with a major American opera company. Smith Moore wrote Watch and Pray, an incredible piece for voice and piano, for Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37KwJqBKl4

She credits the church music she grew up with, as well as the songs her parents would sing to her, which they learned from their parents, former slaves, as her first inspirations to compose, as she would notate and set the songs her parents sang. A beautiful arrangement of hers is We Shall Walk Through the Valley in Peace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xW4hPPDj48

She attended Fisk University, Tennessee, a historically black institution of higher learning, to study piano, organ and music theory. She was the first person studying at Fisk to be awarded a scholarship from Julliard , however she turned it down to continue her studies at Fisk and graduated top of her class in 1926. Her teaches urged her to move to New York City to continue her compositional studies, so she enrolled in Columbia University Teachers College, where she gained her diploma in 1931. She was honoured with the Governors Award in the Arts in 1985, and had two honorary doctorates from Virginia State, received in 1972 and another from Indiana University, in 1976.