MARGARET McALLISTER - SCOTLAND
BORN 6 MARCH
Margaret McAllister, a composer member and Co-President of Composers in Red Sneakers, has composed music for many different genres, including orchestral works, choral music, a variety of chamber ensembles, for electroacoustic media, solo works, film, and music for performance by children. She pursued her undergraduate work in film scoring at Berklee College of Music, Boston and her graduate studies in classical composition and music theory at Boston University, where her principal teachers were Theodore Antoniou and Lukas Foss. She has also worked with Milton Babbitt, Oliver Knussen, Toru Takemitsu and Joan Tower.
Dr. McAllister has received fellowships and residencies from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Festival at Sandpoint, Scotia Festival of Music, Centres Acanthes, Avignon and the June in Buffalo Festival. Her work has been supported by the Fromm and Navigator Foundations and she has had commissions and performances from professional solo artists and performing ensembles such as the New Millennium Ensemble, Alea III, Boston Composers String Quartet, Pandora's Vox , as well as on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She was the co-founder of Crosscurrents, a new music platform dedicated to performing the works of young and emerging composers and is the artistic director and founder of Hyperprism, a contemporary concert series at Boston College.
♫ LISTEN
Winding Round by Margaret McAllister
HELEN HAGAN - USA
DIED 6 MARCH
Helen Eugenia Hagan (10 January 1891 – 6 March 1964) was an American pianist, music educator and composer. She was was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the daughter of John A. and Mary Estella Neal Hagan. She studied piano with her mother and then in the public schools of New Haven, Connecticut. Ca. age nine, she began playing organ for the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in New Haven.
She studied at Yale University with Stanley Knight and graduated in 1912 with a bachelor's degree in music, playing her own Concerto in C Minor in May 1912 at Yale. In doing so, she became the first known African American woman to earn a Yale degree. She received the Samuel Simmons Stanford scholarship to study in Paris, with Blanche Selva and Vincent d'Indy, and graduated from Schola Cantorum in 1914. She returned to the United States as World War I began and began a career as a concert pianist, touring from 1915 to 1918. In 1918 she was music director (meaning music department chair) at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College. In early 1919 she left for France to entertain black troops of the AEF, along with Joshua Blanton and Rev. Henry Hugh Proctor, under the auspices of the YMCA.
The only work by Helen Hagan that survives is the Concerto in C Minor for Piano and Orchestra. Her other compositions, including piano works and a violin sonata, have been lost.[9]
♫ LISTEN
Concerto in C minor (extract) by Helen Hagan
Concerto in C minor (extract) by Helen Hagan
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