“And to then come to a place like Yale demonstrates that she had great musical gifts as both a performer and a composer,” he said. The fact that she so quickly became the pianist at the leading church in the city gives an idea of just how talented she was, said Yale School of Music Dean Robert Blocker. “I feel that it’s so important to show just what these women were capable of, and the ways in which they broke down the variety of stereotypes that sought to really contain them.” From a New Haven church to Yale’s concert hallīorn in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Hagan moved to New Haven when she was a young girl. “With this album and with all my albums, I always want to show off women’s virtuosity because of the gendered and racial stereotypes around intellectual ability,” she said. “I hadn’t performed her music before, but I had been aware of it for a very long time,” said Ege, who included the composition on “Black Renaissance Woman,” an album she recorded with John Paul Ekins. The piano soloist for the event will be Samantha Ege, a British concert pianist and musicologist who featured Hagan’s concerto on a recent album. 21 concert in Woolsey Hall, where Hagan first performed her concerto with an ensemble in a 1912 concert by student performers. The first movement of Hagan’s Concerto for C minor for Piano and Orchestra - her only surviving musical composition - will be one of the featured pieces in the Yale Philharmonia’s Oct. Next week, from the first time in 110 years, a musical composition by Hagan will reach the ears - and the hearts - of a Yale campus audience. Horatio Parker, the school’s first dean and the founding conductor of the NHSO, wrote that Hagan showed “not only pianistic talent of rare promise but also clearly marked ability to conceive and execute musical ideas of much charm and no little originality.” Hagan was only nine when she first played organ at the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, the world’s oldest formally recognized African-American Congregational church.Īt Yale, where in 1912 she became the first Black woman to graduate from the School of Music, she performed her own Piano Concerto in C minor and later performed Saint-Saëns’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO). But she already had plenty of experience performing before audiences in New Haven. More than century ago, a teenager named Helen Hagan arrived on the Yale campus as a student at the Yale School of Music (which then offered undergraduate degrees).
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