Samantha Ege Interview
Below is the transcript of my interview with Samantha Ege, and you’ll find the button link to take you to the podcast and video versions as well as show notes with all the links. Samantha Ege is both a leading scholar and interpreter of Florence Price. In this interview, she talks about her recent book “South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene”. I was fascinated to learn about this compelling history of Chicago’s Black Renaissance with women such as Nora Holt, Margaret Bonds, and Katherine Dunham. Dr. Ege shared how the scholarship side of her work informs both her identity as a pianist and also how this research and storytelling cause her to reflect on some of her own challenges. We also talked about some of her other recent recording projects, including the upcoming Avril Coleridge-Taylor piano concerto and chamber music with Castle of our Skins, and she reflected candidly on her personal creative life as a writer, performer and composer.
Samantha Ege (00:00:00):
There's this beautiful story that Margaret Bonds tells, and she also writes about of all of Black Chicago's classical musicians coming to the Bonds' kitchen table and copying out parts of Florence Price, so there's that real sense of community. At the same time, what's really interesting is that this category, of the symphonic category for the Wannamaker contest, was carried over from the year before. Knowing that these women were super strategic, I really think that, that gave Florence Price the incentive because she knew that she would win that opportunity. That massive pinnacle in her career is counted by these very difficult personal circumstances that she's going through as well.
Leah Roseman (00:02:11):
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a diversity of guests.Samantha Ege is both a leading scholar and interpreter of Florence Price. In this interview, she talks about her recent book “South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene”. I was fascinated to learn about this compelling history of Chicago’s Black Renaissance with women such as Nora Holt, Margaret Bonds, and Katherine Dunham. Dr. Ege shared how the scholarship side of her work informs both her identity as a pianist and also how this research and storytelling cause her to reflect on some of her own challenges. We also talked about some of her other recent recording projects, including the upcoming Avril Coleridge-Taylor piano concerto and chamber music with Castle of our Skins, and she reflected candidly on her personal creative life as a writer, performer and composer. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com This weekly podcast is in Season 5 and I send out an email newsletter where you can get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this series, and also the timestamps to help you navigate the episode.
(00:02:12):
Hi Samantha. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Samantha Ege (00:02:19):
Thank you for this invitation.
Leah Roseman (00:02:21):
So I really enjoyed your first book, Southside Impresarios. So let's talk about the title, how Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene. I was a little taken aback. I wasn't familiar with that term Race women. Can you speak to that first of all?
Samantha Ege (00:02:36):
Yes. I mean, it's a term that is not in our every day. Most people will not be familiar with it. It's a term from the late 19th century and early 20th century that really captured a social group, a social set of Black women and Black men who were not like the majority of the African-American population. This was a cohort that identified as a talented 10th, which was the terminology used by W.E.B. Du Bois, which meant that the top 10% of the population through their education, their wealth, their access, their relative privilege would uplift the rest of the race. And so Race women took on this mantle as the sort of beacons for society. They really embraced the leadership roles and the responsibility that came with having a certain set of advantages. But that doesn't mean that there weren't problematic elements to that way of thinking, which is something that I explore in the book.
Leah Roseman (00:03:35):
So your albums came out before the book, like Black Renaissance Women and also your album of Florence Price's music. But meanwhile, you were doing the scholarship at the same time?
Samantha Ege (00:03:47):
Yes. The thing is, scholarship seems to take much longer. So I was working on this scholarship really since the moment you could even say the moment I first learned about Florence Price, which was when I was an undergraduate student at McGill University when I was 19 years old. I've always been since then always been thinking about Florence Price and what it would mean to tell her story in a way that made Black women plural, feel represented and seen in the classical music world. So that idea had been swimming around my mind since I was rather young, but really it wasn't until launching myself into my master's, my PhD, doing my dissertation on Florence Price, that I became aware of the kind of story that I wanted to tell, which was not just Price the individual, but this network of women. But doing that versus learning a piece of music, these are projects of a completely different scale. And so while the ideas of this book have taken a longer time to sort of culminate with this final project, I have been thinking through this alongside these recordings, and you could say that the recordings sort of chart different processes of my journey.
Leah Roseman (00:05:00):
Yeah, I was curious because you're British, you came to McGill for one semester. I did my undergraduate there. I'm Canadian.
Samantha Ege (00:05:05):
I was there for a year.
Leah Roseman (00:05:07):
So as a Black British woman coming to Canada and then being exposed to this music, and then you've been immersed in this music of mostly Chicago, how did that feel for you?
Samantha Ege (00:05:18):
There's a really interesting thing that I identify as the Josephine Baker phenomenon, which is where Black women often have to go away in order to find themselves in order to establish themselves. And I learned that quite early with my experience at McGill, the way in which I felt more confident than I'd ever been in my whole life and the way that certain networks of brilliant mentors of amazing fellow students came together in a way that I hadn't fully experienced before. And I don't think I would've experienced that if I'd stayed in the same country. And by that same token, Josephine Baker obviously leaves the united to reestablish herself in Paris and creates a completely different identity because the landscape allows her to reinvent herself. But actually perhaps she doesn't create a new identity. Perhaps she can be more herself than she ever was. And so something about travel has been really important to my sense of self discovery and self identity. And I think that is also something that we see with Florence Price's story where she has to leave her home of Little Rock to go to Chicago to become the composer that she always knew that she was. So even though I'm from the U.K., I have this completely different story In some ways, that experience of being an outsider and redefining or reinventing yourself within a different geography is something that I found I had a lot in common with when it came to the women that I was writing about.
Leah Roseman (00:06:52):
Now, your album of her music is called Fantasie Nègre, and she wrote several of these pieces.
Samantha Ege (00:07:00):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:07:01):
I guess I wanted to - you know, some of these white, racist white composers like Powell use the same title in a different way. And I was reading in the book you talk about these awful program notes about his piece. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Samantha Ege (00:07:14):
Yes. This title of Fantasie Nègre reflects a collection of pieces that Florence Price wrote, and the first one in E minor was the first piece that I ever heard by Florence Price, the first piece that I ever heard by a Black woman, Classical composer. So that piece was incredibly transformative for me. And what I hear in that title is the imagination, a wild Imagination of a Blackness beyond boundaries, borders, stereotype, et cetera. And I could hear that in the music as well. It's incredibly rhapsodic. You've got this spiritual quotation, but it goes in all sorts of virtuosic directions. And it was dedicated to Margaret Bonds who was 15 years old at that time, which really shows how impressive a pianist she is because that is not an easy piece to play. And so this piece, it just envelops so many narratives of sisterhood and empowerment, the story of Florence Price's, migration and her becoming.
(00:08:10):
But then you also have people like John Powell who recognize, which seems to be the case throughout history, that Black music is cool, it's to be extracted without the experience of what it means to be Black. So he is jumping on a bandwagon. He writes a piece, Rhapsody nègre, I think at some moment, I can't remember, I can't say he's someone that I think too much about beyond the book, but he wrote a piece which had nègre in the title, and he used nègre with the lowercase as well, which signified his dislike isn't even a strong enough word. I mean, he wanted people wiped off the planet, wiped off the United States. He didn't think that Black people had any sense of humanity, and yet he spent so much time writing music with Black musical ideas in a way that was very weird and obsessive, but as is the nature with appropriation, he was more welcome in the American music canon than Black composers. And so it's really powerful that Florence Price is reclaiming this title. Nora Holt is reclaiming it with Rhapsody Nègre. Sorry, that's the name of her piece. I can't remember Powell's piece at this moment, but it's very interesting that women are counter claiming this title. Well, actually not even counter claiming because it's their word, it's their identity, it's their experience. But still the white American mainstream would rather hear Black life told through the voice of a white supremacist.
Leah Roseman (00:09:55):
And of these three pieces she wrote with that title, it was the E minor. That was the one you heard in Montreal.
Samantha Ege (00:10:00):
Yes, it was. It was. And then I also heard Margaret Bond's Troubled Water, which is also in E minor. And so for me, I think this key just makes me feel so at home because that's how I felt as soon as I heard this music, I just felt that everything that I've been working towards made sense. I wasn't an anomaly in classical music anymore. I had a home because of these women.
Leah Roseman (00:10:24):
I love that piece of Bonds', Troubled Water, and your playing of it. Actually, I want to talk about her a little later, but I was hoping we could include maybe that.
Samantha Ege (00:10:32):
Yes, absolutely.
Leah Roseman (00:10:34):
You're about to hear Troubled Water by Margaret Bonds from Samantha Ege's concert in Chicago for Crossing Borders music. The video is linked in the show notes of this episode. (music)
(00:15:46):
So if we could go back to Southside Impresarios, it's a beautiful ecosystem you described for us, and there's so many elements, we won't be able to get into everything, but even the beginning, you have this map of the geography of the Black community was squashed into this tiny area. And even the fact that someone like Michelle Obama was her musical education was the fruit of this many generations of this kind of nurturing.
Samantha Ege (00:16:12):
Yes. Thank you for pointing out the maps because I really wanted to bring the visual side to this story because yes, we have the music and we have these individuals, but I really wanted people to just get a sense of what that space looked like and to get a sense of what segregation in the north looked like, because it's very easy for us to talk about the segregated south. And in a way we are not interrogating the north as much. We are not interrogating why it was that there was a Black Chicago renaissance that happened because of the geography and obviously the brilliance that came out of that geography, but a different geography would've engendered a different kind of cultural movement or perhaps a less potent cultural movement. So in an early version of an article that I wrote, I had scans of maps from the 1920s and thirties and drew with the word processor circles around locations, et cetera.
(00:17:17):
And so with this book, I definitely wanted to go all out and commissioned some really visually engaging maps rather than the DIY approach of my earlier writings. But I think as well, I went to Chicago a lot to do this work. I went especially to the Center for Black Music Research, and I also had experiences of playing in Chicago. And so for me it was just really important to represent that history in a visual way and just to draw on these different aspects that are perhaps not readily associated with music history musicology, but actually that cartographic element I think is really important. And that's represented by the fact that it's in the center of the book because geography is really central to the story.
Leah Roseman (00:18:08):
So you'd mentioned that Florence Price had come up from Little Rock, Arkansas, and I want to talk about her Symphony number one because she'd broken her foot and there's a quote, "when shall I ever be so fortunate again as to break a foot?" Because she had time to work on the symphony, she couldn't work.
Samantha Ege (00:18:26):
Yes. So this symphony, I do wonder if there were sort of prototypical elements of it when she wrote a symphony as a teenager for the New England Conservatory because I mean, just even in that story alone, it means that she was really waiting for the opportunity to write a symphony. It's not that she couldn't, it's just that the opportunity wasn't there. And she waited until her mid forties for that moment, and a lot of things kind of happened. And I think this is something that we all go through where our highs are also coupled with extreme lows in our careers. It's never always altogether in one place as we would like it to be. So she's going through this horrible divorce around the same time as well, and she becomes a single mother and she ends up staying with the Bonds family. So this is Margaret Bonds and Estella Bonds.
(00:19:25):
And then there's this looming deadline for the Wannamaker contest, which is a contest for African American composers specifically writing classical music because there's relatively more opportunity for those in popular music, but not so much in classical music. So there's this deadline, she's in this horrible situation personally, but then professionally there's this turning point that's coming and there's this beautiful story that Margaret Bonds tells, and she also writes about of all of Black Chicago's classical musicians coming to the Bonds kitchen table and copying out parts of Florence Price. So there's that real sense of community at the same time. And what's really interesting is that this category of the symphonic category for the Wannamaker contest was carried over from the year before, which to me suggests that there weren't a lot of good submissions from that year. And so knowing that these women were super strategic, I really think that that gave Florence Price the incentive because she knew that she would win. And as I said, it's all about opportunity, but I also said that opportunity, that massive pinnacle in her career is counted by these very difficult personal circumstances that she's going through as well.
Leah Roseman (00:20:39):
Yeah, and you mentioned she was staying with the Bonds family, and Margaret Bonds is such an interesting person, and she was mentored by Florence, and you have a quote of Margaret saying how she didn't like this trend towards atonal music, and she said, people have to like it. It has to move them.
Samantha Ege (00:20:55):
Yes. So Margaret Bonds did sort of wonder if she might've benefited from studying under Nadia Boulanger, who didn't accept her, didn't take her on, but she did wonder if she'd kind of pursued that more sort of atonal postmodernist direction if she might be more sort of popular. But ultimately, she was so grounded in the tradition of Florence Price, of William Dawson, of Harry T. Burley, these very romantic Americanist composers. So I think even if she wanted to fully embrace that sound world, it just wasn't her because the Bonds family home was a place where all of these luminaries visited. And so she's absorbing this romantic, this Spiritual-inspired sound world, and that is her voice really.
Leah Roseman (00:21:47):
Now, without question, one of the most interesting people in this book is Nora Holt, and I did listen to the podcast that you were featured on recently, which is devoted to her. She's just such an interesting person. But the tragedy of her stolen music, it was just shocking.
Samantha Ege (00:22:00):
Yes. So when Nora Holt was in Paris around 1931, she actually studied with Nadia Boulanger. She was also going through a terrible divorce. So that theme of career highs, personal lows, it happens. And so shes thriving essentially in Europe, but when she comes back, she keeps her items in storage and she finds that they've been ransacked and it just affects her so deeply because this is 200 plus compositions gone. And as we know through the recovery of Florence Price's, music, it's all handwritten because people are generally not publishing music by Black women at this time.
(00:22:45):
It's such a tragedy. And the only two pieces that exist are the ones that she published herself, but that was in 1921. So there's a whole era of music from her that is just gone. And we know that she wrote music for orchestra. She wrote these large scale pieces. And so it's just there's this absence, which really counts the fact that she was such a huge presence. She was there with Josephine Baker, she was at the salons of Gertrude Stein. I have no doubt that she mixed in the same circles as Picasso as well, because she was literally everywhere. And yet we don't get to hear her classical music voice, which I think is awful. But on the flip side, she did radio so we actually can access her spoken voice. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Florence Price. So we have that opposite situation there. But in many ways as well, she was an opposite to Florence Price in terms of Florence Price being this very sort of reserved, respectable Race Woman. And Nora Holt was a Race Woman too, but she was extremely extroverted. She was very sexually liberated. So we have these different ideas around Black womanhood at that time represented by these two women, but they were good friends.
Leah Roseman (00:24:08):
And Nora, she's the first Black American to receive a Master's of music.
Samantha Ege (00:24:14):
Yes. So not first Black woman, but the first person of African descent, which is monumental. And she achieved that with a composition called Rhapsody Nègre based on Black folk themes. So she wrote that in 1918, and it's just such a shame that we can't recover that work.
Leah Roseman (00:24:38):
And her work as a journalist, I found quite interesting. She was a real trailblazer there as well.
Samantha Ege (00:24:42):
Yes. She was the first music critic for a Black newspaper, which was the Chicago Defender in 1917. And she wrote about classical music. She grew up in such a way where things like ragtime and jazz were kind of seen as not respectable music. So she definitely absorbed that during that phase of her adulthood. And that changed when she traveled to Europe and sort of expanded her horizons. But as a music journalist, her focus is classical music because it ties in with this idea of the Talented 10th with racial uplift with we can prove our intellectuality to the dominant culture and that will help us bridge Black and white. And it was all very idealistic, but classical music really had that political function for women like Nora Holt, and she fully embraced that with this hope that it would lead to racial harmony.
Leah Roseman (00:25:37):
So her first review was published in some sort of women's article and the Defender, but after that she was part of the main,
Samantha Ege (00:25:43):
Yeah, so her first article was on the women's page, which was a very common sort of feature at the time where unquote women's issues would be put on this one page. And so the fact that her story only ever featured there once, I think speaks volumes of how she was able to break from these rigid gender constraints and tell her story in a more expansive kind of way.
Leah Roseman (00:26:09):
You point out how her reviews of concerts were kind of descriptive because she knew many of the listeners wouldn't have the opportunity to attend these concerts, let's say, of the Chicago Symphony. So it gives you reviews aren't written the same way. Now we don't have that style,
Samantha Ege (00:26:23):
Right. Her reviews were a form of activism. They were a form of building community and building audience in spaces that they weren't necessarily segregated, but they weren't readily making Black patrons feel welcome. And also, some of these readers weren't in big cities, they weren't in spaces that had these kinds of concert halls. And so she is inviting readers of different backgrounds from different places to feel a part of the classical world and is really attempting to break down these strictures that are very racially entrenched.
Leah Roseman (00:27:06):
I'm curious if you could have some magic or go back in time to meet one person in this book. We're not going to talk about every single, there's so many people. Do you have someone you'd really just love to talk to?
Samantha Ege (00:27:20):
Absolutely. Nora Holt.
Leah Roseman (00:27:21):
Okay.
Samantha Ege (00:27:22):
Definitely. It's interesting because through this process, I've dreamt about quite a few of these women. Margaret Bonds is one of them, and I'll share a story with you about for ages, I was trying to find a picture of Margaret Bond's mother Estella Bonds because I'd been looking for ages and ages and ages and just had no proper sense of what she looked like. There was a picture of the terrible resolution in the Chicago Defender, but you couldn't really see her. It was just splodges of white and black essentially. And at the time I was living in Singapore and I was teaching there, and I had this dream where Margaret Bonds said, if you follow me, I will show you a picture of my mother. The implication was that if I follow, I had a few colleagues there as well. If I followed them, I would never see the picture.
(00:28:15):
And so I feel that through my path of leaving Singapore and following Margaret Bonds, I eventually, I did find a picture of Estella Bonds, which was someone posted and I credit them in the book. They posted a picture that I used in the book, and they named every single person. And Estella Bonds was there. And it just felt very sort of magical to have had that sense of conversation with Margaret Bonds because whether or not you believe in all of that kind of stuff, the truth of it was that if I pursued this work, I would find a picture of Margaret Bonds. That is ultimately what my takeaway is from that. And as well with the conclusion of the book, I write in almost conversation with one of the protagonists. So I would absolutely love to time travel, but I think my work is sort of leaning into what we do as performers. We communicate with the composer, we communicate their intentions to audiences. And I think through performance, that sort of carried over into this writing process where I thought, well, why wouldn't I want to communicate with these women as much as I can to tell their stories, which is not very academic and rational, but I valued it so much as part of my creative and intellectual process.
Leah Roseman (00:29:36):
But in terms of Florence Price, she has come up a couple times on this podcast and we've played some of her music. I thought it might be, well, maybe we should include a clip of that Fantasie Nègre in E minor we were just talking about, but also something less known like her Moonlight. Yeah, the Snapshots Moonlight Behind a Cloud.
Samantha Ege (00:29:54):
Yes. This is one of her later works, and the language is so different, it's so dreamy. It's a little bit too easy to say. It's got a sort of Debussy impressionistic style, but I think it's her just really expanding her palette and indulging. She's established herself as a composer, meaning that she's a little bit freer to explore different kinds of sound worlds, and it's a really, really beautiful set because she's literally painting. There's so much colour in the Snapshot set.
Leah Roseman (00:30:27):
You'll find the piece we were just talking about, Snapshots: Moon Behind a Cloud on Samantha's recording "Fantasie Nègre: the Piano Music of Florence Price". I don't have permission from the record company to share a clip from that recording, but I encourage you to click on Samantha's website link in the show notes.
(00:30:44):
In terms of your life as a performer and scholar, I was just looking to see, and I was interested, I think it was on Instagram recently, you posted a little picture of your practice diary and it was colorful, and I thought, wow, what a beautiful, I want to ask her about this.
Samantha Ege (00:31:01):
Yes, I have loads of practice diaries. It's interesting because I don't always look back on them, but I'm always writing in them, and I write in all sorts of colors. So I've got a purple practice diary at the moment, which is full of pinks and purples and all sorts of illustrations. I write a lot of hearts to myself to remind myself that I love what I do and that I love myself for doing what I do. We can berate ourselves as performers and say, oh, that was terrible. I used to do that again. Or we can say, you know what? That was actually pretty good considering that you haven't slept or considering that you've been on tour, that's great. It'll be better next time. We can be really kind to ourselves. That's an option that we have. And so yes, with these my practice diaries, I document as much as I can in terms of my process, there are some things that I write where I imagine if my work ever ended up in an archive, people would probably laugh at some of the silly things that I write to myself. But I also write things that people tell me after concerts as well. And I do look back on it, but probably not as regularly as I should.
(00:32:16):
But it's an extension, I guess, of what's going on up here in my brain. And I think I would guess there's a lot of color based on what I put on the paper.
Leah Roseman (00:32:27):
And does it help you with memorization as well? I was noticing the kinds of things you were writing about the form of pieces, and
Samantha Ege (00:32:33):
Yes, it does. I mean, the challenges with a lot of my repertoire is it hasn't necessarily been played before. And when I'm doing solo pieces, there is in a way sort of a little less pressure in terms of, I mean, I still want to know the piece inside out, but it all comes down to me versus when you're collaborating with others and there's a lot more responsibility there. So what I posted on my social media were my notes for Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto, which I knew existed about four or five years ago. I saw it written on the finding aid of the Royal College of Music, and I thought one day I'd love to play that piece. And it's funny, if I say that, it means it's probably going to happen. It tends to take about, it's like a four year germination period from when I say it to when it happens, which is quite exciting to know.
(00:33:29):
So I knew that I wanted to play it, but I had no concept of what it sounded like. And then when I had the handwritten manuscripts, and I say three because there was a piano, one part, piano two, and then full orchestra and slight variations among the three. So even then, I still didn't have a full sense of what it sounded like. And then you're playing through it and you're going, how does that connect? What's coming next? Does she mean this? Because your mind is also trying to process something that it doesn't know. And so it's going into pockets of familiarity. But Avril Coleridge-Taylor isn't the other composers that I might associate with a certain style. She has her own style. And so in that process, I have just found it really helpful to map out what is going on because it's helping me experience the bigger picture, even though I won't play this with orchestra until the day before the recording.
Leah Roseman (00:34:27):
Yeah. So this is a really exciting project. You're recording it in early January. And so this will have been recorded by the time this episode is released.
Samantha Ege (00:34:36):
Yes!
Leah Roseman (00:34:36):
Do you have any anticipation of when the actual CD will come out?
Samantha Ege (00:34:39):
October, 2025.
Leah Roseman (00:34:41):
Okay. And do you want to speak to who she was?
Samantha Ege (00:34:44):
So Avril Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer, and her father might be a more familiar name to listeners. Her father was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was a British composer of both African and English heritage. He was such a big name in his time. He was recognized by the top orchestras, the top musicians, composers, et cetera, on my side of the pond and yours, he was such a big deal, but he essentially died in poverty and the system of royalties and recognition and that institutional infrastructure that upholds a composer's name just wasn't there for him. And so he kind of fell into obscurity, and there's no doubt that him being a man of African descent compounded that our societies find much easier to forget Black historical figures. His daughter, though, was very influenced by him. His daughter loved composition, and I think she loved her father's music, but she also wanted to establish her own sense of self beyond the Coleridge-Taylor name to the extent that she actually sometimes composed under the name Peter Riley.
(00:36:00):
But she wrote a lot of large scale compositions like this piano concerto, other works for orchestra. She wrote a lot of songs. She wrote a lot of solo piano music. And what's really interesting about this piano concerto is that she performed it in South Africa at the height of Apartheid because of her racial ambiguity. Well, in the UK we have a different language around race. So there wasn't the one drop rule, so she didn't identify as Black because she was a mixed race woman, and she looked like most sort of English women at the time. So she went to South Africa not really being fully aware of the implications of their racial regime in a way that perhaps an African-American woman would've been more aware because of the affinity of Apartheid and Jim Crow. But it's just fascinating to think that she goes there, and this third movement of the piano concerto is dedicated to her father.
(00:36:53):
And so you have this all white pro-Apartheid orchestra that she's conducting. And through that, the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his legacy is being uplifted in this really odd and toxic and dangerous almost context. But her father's name was a big name. And so she gets found out in a way and is made to go back to the U.K. But it's such an interesting story about the complications of race, the conditionality of Britishness, where you are reminded that you're not British if you don't look a certain way or you don't have a certain heritage. And it's just been really eyeopening for me to examine, I guess, a part of my own history. I do so much about on African-American and American history at large, but to look, I guess closer to home and to think about those dynamics and to think about what the dynamic, the landscape of Black British classical music looks like today is. It's been, I guess, a more personal journey, but an important one.
Leah Roseman (00:38:03):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. You may be also interested in the following episodes, which I’ve linked directly in the show notes for you, with Gerry Bryant, Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, Vahn Black, Rebeca Omordia, Omo Bello, DeWitt Fleming Jr. , and Destiny Muhammad, among so many. It is a privilege to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. Please sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. And if you’re finding this interesting, please text this episode to a friend!
(00:38:56):
Now, I know you're super busy, but I'm wondering, do you compose at all?
Samantha Ege (00:39:02):
I do. So I do compose. I don't fully have enough time to dedicate to that, and so I envision it'll be something that I come back to later down the line. But I think what I do is I end up playing the pieces that I wish I could compose to make up for it in the meantime. But I've always loved creating music. I've composed for as long as I've played. I started playing the piano at the age of three. I used to improvise alongside the radio, alongside the TV, and then actually write my own music, classical music as well as pop songs. But it's just something I haven't had as much time to do.
Leah Roseman (00:39:41):
Wow, that's interesting. And then back to when you said you heard Florence Price's music for the first time. You hadn't heard music by a Black woman in the classical realm, so maybe you didn't, growing up, think of yourself as being able to take on that role.
Samantha Ege (00:39:54):
Yeah. When you put it that way, I think that's definitely true because it's not that I had visible role models in terms of being a composer. And actually I also didn't have that really as a pianist, and that's not an identity that I claimed immediately either. The only thing that I felt truly attached to was the writing side of things, and I think that's because maybe writers are quite invisible. So you can read a book by an author and you're not picturing the author, you're picturing the characters. And so nothing about being an author, being a writer seemed insurmountable that I had a clear sense that that was something that I could do. But yes, definitely as a composer, as a pianist, definitely as a pianist, it took me a very long time to claim the identity.
Leah Roseman (00:40:42):
And you're such a beautiful player. That's kind of surprising, but in a way not. Yeah.
Samantha Ege (00:40:46):
Yeah. Thank you. I do appreciate that. I appreciate those compliments. Not in an egotistical way, but in the sense that I have to remind myself that people are listening and people are enjoying this, and the hangups of the past and the comments of the past and experiences that would derail potentially or actually did derail in some instances, that is completely irrelevant when I hear comments like that. So thank you.
Leah Roseman (00:41:17):
And when you present concerts like solo recitals, often you do include narrative different format.
Samantha Ege (00:41:23):
Yes. It's something that I did a lot of at the beginning, especially because I was sharing this work in a lot of academic spaces, but then when I sort of moved more into performance spaces, I just performed because that's kind of what you do. But with this music, it needs a bit more than that. It needs introduction, it needs contextualization, it needs the audience to feel that they're a part of the journey. And so I began thinking again about the concept of the lecture recital and how I don't really like it. I don't like the rigidity of the word lecture and the recital tact on because they should be a lot more in dialogue, and it shouldn't necessarily be a lecture. It should be more of a conversation. And so that's been something that I've really been working on as I was thinking about this book and that I would want to play, I would want to talk about the book, but in a way that felt more sort of cohesive and not too academic as well. So I've really been enjoying that. And I think doing so much radio and these kinds of podcasts and just being able to talk about this work without the, I guess, that aura of academia, which can sometimes really suck the joy out of a project, it can make people forget that it's okay to just enjoy and engage from a place of personal connection rather than performative intellectuality. It is been really good to reassess what the lecture recital is and what I think it could be.
Leah Roseman (00:43:07):
And in fact, I noticed in your schedule of performances, you're coming back to Chicago in April to present a concert?
Samantha Ege (00:43:13):
Yes. So there's a lot more actually that I'll be doing. I will be doing a concert at Northwestern. I will be visiting and performing as well at the University of Chicago, as well as the Newbury Library, as well as doing a recorded concert at the WFMT as well. So it might all be on the calendar by the time this comes out, but there are a lot of exciting things in the works. So it's going to be a busy week, but it always feels special to play in Chicago because I don't take it for granted. I'm a British woman who has been invited to this incredible city through playing this music, through telling these stories. So it's going to be a really special time. And also April is Florence Price's birthday month, so I'll be in Chicago and performing as well on her birthday.
Leah Roseman (00:44:04):
And when you were writing this book, a lot of it was during the height of the pandemic, and I understand you had an online supportive writers group.
Samantha Ege (00:44:10):
Yes. Yeah, it was really wonderful to have a group of Black women researchers in music that was UK based. It was a tiny group because there are not that many of us here. But it was just really wonderful to know that there are different generations of Black women in classical music in the U.K. And to feel that I'm not alone doing this work and having the kinds of interests that I have, and I guess in many ways it really mirrored the kinds of sisterhoods that I write about. So it was a really special time to be able to connect virtually with other Black women in academia, especially in music.
Leah Roseman (00:44:59):
You also talk a little bit about other art forms like dance with Katherine Dunham, and it is heartbreaking to realize, of course, the Black dancers weren't welcome in white studios to study dance, so she had to create something.
Samantha Ege (00:45:14):
Yes. So I also have a background in ballet. So I did ballet for quite a long time through my childhood to my early teens, and to sort of come back to ballet through this was really, really quite enjoyable actually, because it made me think about the worlds that Black women create in so many different spheres. And it also just allows me to pause and to think about and to better understand why I felt like this could never be for me. The Fantasie Nègre piece that I first heard back when I was studying at McGill was a piece that Katherine Dunham took on as a ballet. So all of these aspects of my world seemed to come together in this piece. And then to find a photograph of these women performing Fantasie Nègre, brings the sound world to life in a visual way. We can see that how these women are dressed in a time of blackface minstrels, see where white men are donning black faces to impersonate not just Black men, but Black women, to see Katherine Dunham and her dancers in this choreography of their limbs are interconnected. There's a real sort of smooth contour that connects them all, which is what we hear in Fantasie Nègre. There are these cascading passages, and it's never jarring. It's not parody in the vein of Golliwog's Cake Walk and all of that kind of stuff. It was just really beautiful to see the music in dance form and to know about the interactivity of these worlds.
Leah Roseman (00:47:05):
And another thing that came up, which I found upsetting, is these Boston Six, these white composers who are searching for this quote American sound. And you have this quote by Amy Beach, who's a wonderful composer, and she said "The African population is too small for its songs to be considered American."
Samantha Ege (00:47:21):
Yes. So this is the part of my book that I know will not sit well with advocates of women composers, women in music, because there is a reason why Black women had to create their own networks. And part of that was because white women were not welcoming towards them. And Amy Beach is this pioneering, hugely talented classical composer who would align more to white supremacy than sisterhood with Black women. And so I've seen people kind of apologize. Oh, well, she didn't quite mean that. Well, she said what she meant in the context of other composers who said something very, very similar. That's the ideology that she aligned with. And so while there obviously was some interracial cooperation between Black women and white women and Black women and white men, but there was a lot of hostility from white women towards Black women, which is why there was never sort of that full sort of cohesive women's intersectional is what we would call it today, that intersectional women's movement. So it is disappointing, but it's also truly a reflection of what the dynamics generally were at that time.
Leah Roseman (00:48:39):
This is an excerpt from a live performance by Samantha Ege of the Fantasie Nègre number one in E Minor by Florence Price from a concert in Chicago for Crossing Borders music. The link to the complete video is in the show notes of this episode.(music)
(00:51:52):
Oh yeah, I thought it might be interesting to shine a little bit of a light on some of your other projects. So you have a 2022 album of chamber music?
Samantha Ege (00:51:59):
Yes. That was with Castle of Our Skins. We recorded, actually, the way that project started was I was a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford, and through the humanities program, I had the opportunity to bring over this Boston-based group called Castle of our Skins that specialize in uplifting Black artistry, music, dance, visual arts. They're very multifaceted. And so they came over to the U.K.. We did this performance at the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford, which is this very imposing, this imposing place that is deeply steeped in colonialism and imperialism, et cetera. And we filled that space with Black classical music, and that was reflected on the chamber pieces on this album, which include Bongani Ndodana-Breen, Safika,so contemporary South African composer, and with Safika, and having read Bongani's dissertation about how the history of Apartheid and Black dislocation is part of the storytelling of that piece, I knew that I wanted to compliment it with a piece by Undine Smith Moore called Soweto, which was her immediate response to a Soweto massacre in 1986 where people were not only killed, but their relatives were denied the right to bury the dead.
(00:53:24):
And it was something that just moved her. Speaking of dreams, she woke up one night with the word Soweto, just resounding in her head, and that became the rhythmic motif of this piano trio that I absolutely knew we had to play. The problem was I hadn't seen it. And then when I was able to find that the manuscripts were held at Emory University, I was sent over 300 pages to work through it and to figure out, okay, that seems to be the first movement. That seems to be the second. And then I learned that there was a third movement that was never performed in her lifetime. So while I thought we were giving the UK premiere of Soweto, it was actually a world premiere of a three movement piece that she never heard in that full entirety. And the third movement is just gorgeous. I mean, it brought people to tears because she really, in the first and second movement embodies the chaos, the fear, the devastation of Apartheid.
(00:54:23):
But in the third movement, she reflects something about what makes life beautiful amid all of that. And part of me thinks that she needed to compose that for herself to create a sense of closure. So that's represented on that album as well. But that's where my work as a musicologist came in because I am pretty sure the average performer would not go through 300 pages of handwritten manuscripts necessarily. It's often easier to play what's already been engraved and presented to you, but it was a really beautiful and really empowering project. Yeah, very proud of that one.
Leah Roseman (00:55:03):
And you have a new book coming out, the Florence Price Compendium?
Samantha Ege (00:55:08):
Yes. So it's the Cambridge Companion to Florence Price. So these Cambridge Companions are, I guess quite an iconic series in perhaps more so in British academia where it's a collection of essays by the most sort of expert voices in the field. And I remember as a student, I had my Beethoven Companion, my Mozart Companion, all the names that you quote should have. And so when I had this invitation to be the co-editor of the Florence Price Cambridge Companion, I knew that it was a huge moment in terms of recognizing her in such a mainstream way, but also having that opportunity to step up into that role as an editor. And I was able to work on this with my colleague and friend Alexandra Kori Hill, who we were doing our PhD dissertations around the same time. So for us to sort of take that mantle and to have the trust and the collegiality of just such incredible scholars has been really, really huge.
(00:56:14):
And we recognize that so much of what we did would not be possible without the late Rae Linda Brown, for example, who was the first Price biographer and just dedicated so much of her life to Price scholarship. We can do what we do because of her. And before Rae Linda Brown passed away, she allowed one of her colleagues to share some unpublished work with me. And so as soon as this companion opportunity came along, I knew we had to publish it in there. And so it's really special because in the middle of the Companion, we have this chapter by Florence, sorry, by Rae Linda Brown on Harry T. Burley's influence on Florence Price. And so it's just very special to have her voice be with us in this contemporary moment because this is where she belongs in this contemporary moment. She never really got to see the fruits of her labor take off. So we feel very honored to have her voice be a part of this Companion.
Leah Roseman (00:57:16):
And if we could just go back to Southside Impresarios, just to give people more of a taste of what you're talking about. You talked about not just composers and performers, but the whole idea of people presenting concerts and scholarships supporting Marian Anderson's career, for example.
Samantha Ege (00:57:34):
Yes. So the book is really a focus on the behind the scenes work, which as performers, we know that people don't see that behind the scenes work. They see the most glamorous side of it when we step out on stage, all smiles, but not the hours, whether it's practice or the hours of networking, of emailing, of doing all of these things that are part of the artistry, but don't always feel like part of the artistry. And so going back around a hundred years, this is the story of Black women as impresarios, as Black women working behind the scenes to make visible the names that we now know today like Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. But this is also the story of those that kind of slipped between the cracks, those that we don't know. If we can fathom that in 1912, Helen Hagen was a Black woman at Yale writing a piano concerto, which was performed by the Yale student Orchestra, performed by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
(00:58:40):
Then we should be able to think who else is missing? Who was writing piano concertos before her? That should be the question, not, oh, we have our Black women composer tick or check as you see in North America. So it's an important way of thinking about the names that we don't know, which is obviously as historians we tend to deal with facts. And so if we don't know a story we don't know, but there must be a way to think about that. There must be a way to talk about that. And that's what I explore in the book. I talk about the concept of the unfinished symphonist, the symphonists that we don't know those that had Florence Price's potential, but not her opportunity, not her platform. So I hope that this book can lead to other kinds of inquiries, other kinds of stories, that it's not just a celebration of the well-known names, but also a celebration of those that we might never know, but who deserve to be recognized.
Leah Roseman (00:59:42):
Well, to wrap this up, it might be interesting for listeners if you're willing to reflect a little bit on your personal life as a musician, because you have to balance, we talked a little bit about the scholarship takes longer than the performing, but how do you manage things
Samantha Ege (00:59:56):
Generally? There tends to be a dialogue between the research and the repertoire. If there isn't, I get stretched too thin and sort of lose my direction as well. What is it that I'm trying to do here? And that's where the storytelling becomes a really important part of this, because it's a question of what do I want to communicate also, what do I need to communicate? Because I have this sense that I have to play the Julia Perry Piano Concerto. I have to play all of the Fantasie Nègre compositions. I don't know what it is within me that says I have to do this, but that there is this drive. So that's what I have to listen to. I listen to my dreams as well, which composers are kind of swooping in and getting me thinking in a certain way and spurring that creativity. But there are also times where a pianist friend of mine called Daniel Grimwood identified it as I chase the butterflies.
(01:00:57):
So I will see something and go, oh, that looks cool, and pursue that, which is how recordings like the Doreen Carwithen Piano Concerto, which will be out in March, 2025, that came about because I just simply wanted to Google and find a concerto for piano and string orchestra by a woman. And that came up and I heard that piece, and I just kind of stopped everything that I was doing, and it just gripped me. And I can't ever explain why, but it gripped me. And I knew I have to learn this piece. I need to perform it, I need to record it. And now I have, and I'm incredibly proud of it. And it took about four years as well from saying that to the recording. So I think for me, what really, really inspires me, that's the question. And that's the question that shapes my research.
(01:01:53):
And I think more than ever in my scholarship, I'm trying to bridge my identity more as a musicologist and a performer. There is still this sense in the academic world that you're not supposed to be both, or if you're both, you're not very good at one or the other. I don't know where that's come from, but it's something that I try to resist and not internalize because that's not my experience. If I'm not writing and I just play the piano, I feel something's missing. Or if I'm just playing the piano, I miss writing. So I have to do both. But I think that now I need to reflect both and reflect the conversation that I've always felt internally, but haven't necessarily always showed outwardly. And part of that as well was me not claiming the word pianist, saying, oh, I'm not really a pianist because of what a pianist is supposed to do or supposed to look like, but there is this strong dialogue and I need both of them. And so I'd love to just continue to reflect why it is that I need both of them in a more public facing way, which I think would definitely inspire new generations who are perhaps hearing similar ideas of you go to Conservatoire to become a pianist, or you do this other route to become a musicologist. I think that there's a sense of responsibility perhaps to show that there can be a different way of doing things, and that's definitely something that I would embrace.
Leah Roseman (01:03:29):
Wonderful. Thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciated this conversation. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
