Undine Smith Moore

Undine Eliza Anna Smith Moore (25 August 1904 – 6 February 1989), the "Dean of Black Women Composers", was an American composer and professor of music in the twentieth century. Moore was originally trained as a classical pianist, but developed a compositional output of mostly vocal music—her preferred genre. Much of her work was inspired by black spirituals and folk music. Quotes One of the most evil effects of racism in my time was the limits it placed upon the aspirations of blacks, so that though I have been ‘making up’ and creating music all my life, in my childhood or even in college I would not have thought of calling myself a composer or aspiring to be one. Black music is a house of many mansions. Blacks have many musics and some of them relate in an extremely universal way to the human condition. Who was Undine Smith Moore? Discover the life and music of the ‘Dean of Black Women Composers’, CLASSIC FM (21 October 2020) There is in addition the fiction of women’s inability to deal with the abstract. Because music is an utterly non-verbal art, there is inevitability 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…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. 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. Undine Smith Moore on Musical Value (23 October 2019) External links Category:1904 births Category:1989 deaths Category:Composers from the United States Category:Women academics from the United States Category:20th-century African-American women Category:Fisk University alumni Category:Juilliard School alumni