Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989)
Undine Smith Moore was the granddaughter of slaves but became known as the “Dean of Black Woman Composers.”
She grew up in an area of Virginia with a large African American population. She sang at the neighborhood Baptist church and started piano lessons at the age of 7. Her college education began at Fisk (an historically black college), after which she got a scholarship to Juilliard, and later attended Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music.
Undine Smith Moore was part of the Harlem Renaissance and a strong supporter of the emerging Civil Rights movement. She later wrote
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.
Undine Smith Moore wrote mostly choral music and music for voice and piano, but also solo piano music and chamber music. Her 1981 choral and orchestral composition Scenes from the Life of a Martyr about Martin Luther King was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Undine Smith Moore’s Afro-American Suite from 1969 is a gorgeous four-movement work for flute, cello, and piano that incorporates several African-American spirituals, beginning with the well-known “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” It is performed here by musicians from Serbia, Poland, and Japan.
This is her 1972 arrangement of an African American spiritual Watch and Pray: