Music Research Seminar: Samantha Ege (University of Southampton)

In June 1987, Virginia native, composer, and educator Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989) began to sketch Soweto for piano trio—a response to the plight of Black South Africans under apartheid. She recalled hearing “Soweto” resound in her mind as a rhythmic motif amid overtones of conflict, which would form the basis of the second movement. “I felt I did not choose the word. The word chose me,” she remarked. As a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Moore’s was not a compositional voice steeped in indigenous South African idioms. Rather, her reaction was more visceral than narrational, more emotive than appropriative. Hers was a language of anger, empathy, and solidarity. 

Tammy L. Kernodle cites Moore’s Before I’d Be a Slave (1953) as, possibly, the first sonic representation of Black female anger in the concert hall, putting into practice “The Uses of Anger” decades before Audre Lorde’s reflections. Building on Kernodle’s observations, this paper explores Moore’s mapping of racial terror and rage in Soweto. (In one passage, for example, the pianist hammers the black keys with their fist, darting the white note clusters in the other hand.) Soweto premiered as a two-movement suite on July 17, 1987. However, Moore’s papers at Emory University reveal an unperformed “Lamentoso” third movement, which, as this paper argues, powerfully shifts the tone from anger to grief to remembrance.

About Samantha Ege

Dr Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020-2022).

Dr Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr Ege's publications and performances shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. Her first book is called South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene and will be published with the University of Illinois Press in Autumn 2024. As a concert pianist, Dr Ege made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (Michael Church, iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. In her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music she gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre set. In 2018, she made her international lecture-recitalist debut at the Chicago Symphony Center with her event A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance, and has presented her research and repertoire at a number of other institutions and venues internationally.

Dr Ege released her debut album in May 2018 called Four Women (Wave Theory Records). She released her critically acclaimed second album in March 2021 called Fantasie Nègre with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.). Her third and fourth albums (both with Lorelt) came out in 2022: Black Renaissance Woman and Homage with the Castle of our Skins string quartet. Her next album highlights 19th and 20th century piano concertos by three prolific women, including Clara Schumann and Doreen Carwithen.