Katherine Emily Eggar (5 January 1874 – 15 August 1961) was an English pianist and composer. Eggar was born and died in London, England, the daughter of Thomas Eggar and Katherine MacDonald. Eggar was active member of the feminist movement especially in terms of opportunities for women in music. At the inaugural meeting of the Society of Women Musicians, Eggar stated, "The conventions of music must be challenged. Women are already challenging conventions in all kinds of ways… We believe in a great future for women composers." (Katherine Emily Eggar, at the inaugural meeting in 1911 of the Society of Women Musicians which she helped found)
She studied piano in Berlin at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory with Klindworth, Brussels at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique with De Greef, and London, and studied composition with Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy of Music, Graduating in 1895. At 19 she became the first woman to perform her own chamber works at a London public concert.
With singer Gertrude Eaton and musicologist Marion M. Scott, she co-founded the Society of Women Musicians in London in 1911 [1] and served as its president in 1914–1915. Eggar ran fortnightly meetings for women composers in the Society. With Marion Scott, she wrote a column in the Chamber Music (a supplement to the periodical The Music Student) called "Women's Doings in Chamber Music."
Eggar was also a Shakespeare archivist and the author of the pamphlets "Shakespeare in His True Colors" (1951) and "The Unlifted Shadow" (1954). She later bequeathed her 253 volume collection to Senate House Library of the University of London. [2] [3] Eggar also spent over thirty years researching the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and believed Lord Oxford to be the real author of Shakespeare's work. She planned to publish her writings, but she died before the preparatory work for her book could be made. [4]
She was a chairman of the Society of Women Musicians. In an opening address, "she expressed the conviction that a strong body of high-principled women musicians might do a great deal to reform public opinion on music and raise the standard of musical politics." [5] She was very aware of the disadvantages of female composers and musicians, and actively worked to create opportunities for women in the realm of music.
In the 1950s, Katharine Eggar was living at 40c Palace Road, Westminster, London. [6]
A photo of Eggar is included prefacing a 2022 YouTube video, in which Professors Michele Bozzi, flautist, and Oriella Caianiello, pianist, perform Eggar's Idyll for flute and piano; both musicians teach at the Conservatorio di Musica Niccolo Piccinni of Bari, Italy. [7] Another photo can be found in the June 2008 edition of Signature: Women in Music. In the photo, Eggar is seated alongside Liza Lehmann and Marion M. Scott, respectively the President and a co-founder, with Eggar, of the SWM. Other members of the SWM also appear. [8]
Eggar composed songs and chamber music. Selected works include:
Chamber
Piano
Voice and Instruments
Six songs from Forbes 'Cantus, and I Fancies' (17thC.)
Voice and Piano
Louise Juliette Talma was an American composer, academic, and pianist. After studies in New York and in France, piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, she focused on composition from 1935. She taught at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and at Hunter College. Her opera The Alcestiad was the first full-scale opera by an American woman staged in Europe. She was the first woman in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the first woman awarded the Sibelius Medal for Composition.
Alice Shields is an American classical composer. She is one of the pioneers of electronic music, and is particularly known for her cross-cultural operas.
Ian Parrott was a prolific Anglo-Welsh composer and writer on music. His distinctions included the first prize of the Royal Philharmonic Society for his symphonic poem Luxor, and commissions by the BBC and Yale University, and for many leading British musicians. In 1958 his cor anglais concerto was first performed at Cheltenham Festival, and in 1963 his cello concerto was given by William Pleeth and the Hallé Orchestra – both concertos were conducted by Sir John Barbirolli.
Hendrik Pienaar Hofmeyr is a South African composer. Born in Cape Town, he furthered his studies in Italy during 10 years of self-imposed exile as a conscientious objector. While there, he won the South African Opera Competition with The Fall of the House of Usher. He also received the annual Nederburg Prize for Opera for this work subsequent to its performance at the State Theatre in Pretoria in 1988. In the same year, he obtained first prize in an international competition in Italy with music for a short film by Wim Wenders. He returned to South Africa in 1992, and in 1997 won two major international composition competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition of Belgium and the first edition of the Dimitris Mitropoulos Competition in Athens. His 'Incantesimo' for solo flute was selected to represent South Africa at the ISCM World Music Days in Croatia in 2005. In 2008 he was honoured with a Kanna award by the Kleinkaroo National Arts Festival. He is currently Professor and Head of Composition and Theory at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town, where he obtained a DMus in 1999.
Marion Margaret Scott was an English violinist, musicologist, writer, music critic, editor, composer, and poet.
Steven Roy Gerber was an American composer of classical music. He attended Haverford College, graduating in 1969 at the age of twenty. He then attended Princeton University with a fellowship to study musical composition.
Alexander Mikhailovich Raskatov is a Russian composer.
James Francis Brown is an English composer. He studied composition with the Viennese émigré Hans Heimler and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
Marc-André Dalbavie is a French composer. He had his first music lessons at age 6. He attended the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied composition with Marius Constant and orchestration with Pierre Boulez. In 1985 he joined the research department of IRCAM where he studied digital synthesis, computer assisted composition and spectral analysis. In the early 1990s he moved to Berlin. Currently he lives in the town of St. Cyprien and teaches orchestration at the Conservatoire de Paris.
Victor-Alphonse Duvernoy was a French pianist and composer.
Otomar Kvěch was a Czech music composer and teacher.
Enid Luff was a Welsh musician, music educator, and composer.
Vally Weigl was an Austrian-American composer and music therapist.
Hermann Zilcher was a German composer, pianist, conductor, and music teacher. His compositional oeuvre includes orchestral and choral works, two operas, chamber music and songs, études, piano works, and numerous works for accordion.
Ivan Fedele is an Italian composer. He studied at the Milan Conservatory.
Hermann Reutter was a German composer and pianist who worked as an academic teacher, university administrator, recitalist, and accompanist. He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.
Juliana Hall is an American composer of art songs, monodramas, and vocal chamber music. She has been described by the NATS Journal of Singing as "one of our country’s most able and prolific art song composers for almost three decades" and, in discussing her 1989 song cycle Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, the Journal went on to assert that "Even at this very early stage in her life and career, Hall knew something about crafting music whose beauty could enhance the text at hand without drawing attention away from that text. This is masterful writing in every respect."
Katharine Mulky Warne was an American composer, pianist and teacher, who founded the Darius Milhaud Society and organized 15 Milhaud festivals in Cleveland, Ohio, to promote his music. She was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On June 27, 1953, She married Clinton L. Warne and they had three children: Kate, Clinton Jr. and Carolyn.
Barbara Jazwinski is a Polish-American composer and pianist known for her contributions to contemporary music. She is Head of the Composition Program at the Newcomb Music Department, Tulane University in New Orleans. She was honored with the Prince Pierre of Monaco Composition Award for her work on the Sextet, and she also secured the top position in the Nicola De Lorenzo Composition Contest for her composition of Music for Chamber Orchestra.