Dorothy Rudd Moore (June 4, 1940 - March 30, 2022[1]) was an American composer and music educator. She was one of the co-founders of the Society of Black Composers. Her works were unpublished, but are available through the American Composers Alliance.[2][3]

Biography

Moore was born in New Castle, Delaware.[4] Her mother was a singer and Moore would make up her own songs as child.[5] Moore knew she wanted to become a composer at a young age and took piano lessons as a child. She learned to play clarinet so that in high school, she should join the previously all-male band.[4] She graduated from Howard University in 1963 where she studied with Mark Fax.[6] She received the Lucy Moten Fellowship to study in France where she continued her studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1963 and Chou Wen-Chung in New York in 1965.[7]

Moore worked as a private music teacher, from 1965-66 taught at the Harlem School of the Arts, in 1969 at New York University and in 1971 at the Bronx Community College.[8] She married cellist and conductor, Kermit Moore, in 1964.[9] In 1969, Moore and her husband were almost prevented from performing at the 1969 Damrosch Memorial Concert because "administrators fretted over having not just one but two 'Negroes' on the program."[10]

Moore has received the Lucy Moten fellowship and other grants, and in 1968 became a co-founder of the Society of Black Composers in New York. Her works, Dirge and Deliverance, and Songs from the Dark Tower were released by Performance Records in 1981.[11] In 1985, the world premiere of her opera, Frederick Douglass, took place in New York City.[12]

Between 1988 and 1990, she sat on the music panel of the New York State Council of the Arts.[13]

Works

Moore has composed song cycles, chamber pieces, orchestral music and an opera. Selected works include:

• Three Pieces for violin and piano, 1967
• Modes for string quartet, 1968
• Dirge and Deliverance for cello and piano, 1971
• Dream and Variations for piano, 1974
• Twelve Quatrains from the Rubaiyat, song cycle, 1962
• Songs from the Dark Tower, song cycle, 1970
• Lament for Nine Instruments, 1969
• Moods for viola and cello, 1969
• Symphony No. 1, 1963
• Transencion, 1986[2]
• Sonnets on Love, Rosebuds, and Death for soprano, violin, and piano
• In Celebration, a collage to poems by Langston Hughes
• Frederick Douglass, opera, 1985

References

External links

• Dorothy Rudd Moore, video interview
• Sonnets on Love, Rosebuds, and Death, video performance
• Interview with Dorothy Rudd Moore, February 10, 1990

This article about an American composer born in the 20th century is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e