Mary Howe, Composer

From left to right: by Mary Howe: “Nocturne” performed by Erica Sipes; “Whimsy” Elaine Lim; “Fragment” sung by Amalia Osuga, with pianist Aimee Fincher, poetry by Cecilia Lee; Three Pieces After Emily Dickinson, "Summers of Hesperides" (Andante con moto).

March is National Women’s History Month, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to focus on some of the many women musicians whose work and creativity continue to help classical music grow and evolve.

The American composer Mary Howe was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1882, and was raised in Washington, D.C. 

She first began studying piano with Herminie Seron, and later began performing publicly.  Accepted to the Peabody Conservatory at the age of eighteen, she studied form and analysis with Howard Thatcher, and piano with Richard Burmeister as well composition with Gustav Strube, the founding conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She later went on to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Although she developed a solid performing career and often partnered with her friend Ann Hull for concerts, she preferred composition, writing a great deal of music for the piano, later writing the chamber work “Three Pieces After Emily Dickinson” and “Chain Gang Song” for orchestra and chorus, which was praised for its lack of femininity. (After the first performance of the work a man from the audience praised the conductor of the piece but then asked why a woman was bowing with the ensemble.)

Howe would go on to co-found the National Symphony Orchestra as well as the Chamber Music Society of Washington.

I am also pleased to write that for my Carnegie Hall solo recital debut in May I will be playing the Mary Howe transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” from his Cantata BWV 208.

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