Very few musicians find equal footing in the worlds of music and words. Some might think of Sir Stephen Hough or Jeremy Denk as modern examples of this phenomenon, though perhaps we should all be paying attention to the probing, curious work of pianist, musicologist and writer Dr. Samantha Ege.
Ege’s creative output centers around sharing untold stories and narratives. Through both words and music, she has brought to light the lives of notable figures who are often excluded from retellings of classical music history. For example, her book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Musical Scene, explores the connections between musician-activists like Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Nora Holt and how they shaped musical life and community in the Windy City.
Beyond writing, Ege also champions historically marginalized voices through her recordings. Each of her albums feature compositions by composers from the African Diaspora, particularly women. Her renditions of their short character pieces and chamber works showcase her deep knowledge of these composers and their lived contexts – a feat that a musicologist could not achieve through writing alone.
In her latest album, Maestra (March 25, Lorelt Records), Ege shares two lesser-known piano concertos by composers Doreen Carwithen and Julia Perry, recorded with conductor Odaline de la Martinez and the Lontano Orchestra. The recordings showcase Ege’s versatility as a performer who both dazzles with virtuosity and makes a listener puzzle intently over a piece, as if it were a sphinx’s riddle. She brings dynamic elegance to Carwithen’s demanding piano writing, and in Perry’s enigmatic work, we hear her organic use of nuance, poetic inflection, and pianistic color.
Leading up to the album release, we asked Ege five questions about her approach to blending performance and scholarship.
Samantha Ege — Photo by Pang-Dian Fan
As a double threat, balancing your creative activities must be its own puzzle. What has the journey been like simultaneously navigating artistic and scholarly fields?
In a word, it’s been liberating. There’s no fixed blueprint for how to do this, nor should there be – because that’s the freedom, you chart your own path. There’s a gorgeous quote by the actor Daniel Kaluuya, who’s asked how he decides which roles to pick. Kaluuya uses the analogy that he’s not trying to be a great singer, but that he wants to sing great songs. This deeply resonates with me as someone who wants to tell great stories. Whether it’s through my artistic work or my scholarly work, I want to be a vehicle for telling some of the incredible stories you’ve never heard. So there’s a natural balance across the two fields because they stem from the same motivation.
I feel very lucky to have mentors who have always given me the space to figure out what I want to do. Odaline de la Martinez, whose label I have recorded most of my albums on and who conducts the concertos on my latest album Maestra, is a great example of someone who has so much experience and expertise and yet knows how to let an artist find their own path. With each album, I hear such incredible evolution across my craft and I am thankful for the trust at the heart of my collaborations with Odaline.
The Carwithen and Perry concertos on your new album are such vivid and unique works individually. What are you hoping to convey by pairing them?
By pairing these works, we get to hear women’s voices in unexpected ways. And people also get to hear me in a different way too. I get to share more of who I am through Doreen Carwithen and Julia Perry. I hear the different sides of myself in these pieces.
What first drew me to Carwithen’s concerto, which she completed in 1948, was how much of my own story I heard in the music. I heard the story of a woman trying to navigate life out of the shadow of others, and find her own voice. I knew that one day I’d have to tell this musical story in my own way. It’s such a powerfully cinematic work. And considering that Carwithen wrote for film, including a documentary about Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, she knew exactly what she was doing with this concerto.
Perry is another composer who had to find ways to exist beyond the shadows of what society expected from her. After all, she was a Black woman living under Jim Crow. But at the height of her career, she found ways to thrive beyond society’s constraints. The Julia Perry scholar Garrett Schumann shared this beautiful interview with me where Aaron Copland asks Perry about her projects. She’s so full of sarcasm and has this whimsical, carefree cool about her. She jokes with Copland, and both he and the audience laugh with her. It’s so wonderful to hear her humor and light-heartedness. I do not think for one minute that life for Julia Perry was easy, but to hear her in this kind of context allows us to hear Black women beyond narratives of oppression and struggle. That’s important.
Perry’s concerto was completed a bit later in 1969. And even though Carwithen and Perry never met, there is a definite conversation between the two women as they’re carving out space for themselves in the classical world. They both compose with a force that demands your attention and leaves you wondering what could have been had illness and other factors not curtailed their careers.
Julia Perry and Doreen Carwithen — Courtesy of Samantha Ege
Were there any unexpected discoveries as you dove into these concertos and the lives of their composers?
It was really fascinating to learn that when Julia Perry studied in Italy, the locals would affectionately call her “Maestra,” which is what inspires the title of this album. It was heart-warming to imagine Perry finding a sense of belonging overseas, and existing beyond the strict racial regime of the United States. But there’s another significance to the “Maestra” title of the album. I learned that Perry had been trying to connect with “Maestro” himself – Leonard Bernstein – to get him to perform one of her scores. Sadly, it was a missed connection; that moment never happened. Still, the fact that Perry was in those circles tells us so much about how much she mattered to that era of American concert music. She was at the heart of it.
As for her personality, I didn’t realize how funny she was until I heard her voice (thanks to the interview Garrett shared with me). It’s so special to hear and not just read what a composer has to say. Because many historical African American women composers were under-documented or not documented at all, these kinds of archives become even more cherished. There are so many voices I long to hear, Florence Price being one of them, because they offer additional insight into the personalities behind the music. So to hear Perry speak was like having a door open into an even deeper layer of who she was. I think the second movement of her concerto carries a lot of her fun-loving side.
With Doreen Carwithen, I learned of her music first and then her story. With Julia Perry it was more the other way around because I came across her name through my wider research on Black women in classical music. And then I heard her music after. But with Carwithen, it was the music that gripped me first and then I had to know more. I learned so much through Carwithen’s biographer Leah Broad whose book Quartet delves into the composer’s life and music. Carwithen’s journey had so many twists and turns: she claimed her compositional voice early in life, then gave it up to support the career of William Alwyn (her composition professor and, later, husband); she changed her name to Mary Alwyn, and then towards the end of her life reclaimed her identity as Doreen Carwithen. I felt such an affinity with her because of how vividly Leah brought her story to life.
In championing historic artists who were often overlooked and marginalized, what perspectives have helped you make their stories and works more easily understood by modern audiences?
I really enjoy sharing the stories behind my repertoire with audiences. And I’m not talking about giving lecture recitals, but having more of a conversation-concert, where I invite the audiences to take this journey with me. I recently did a concert at Lincoln College (University of Oxford) where I used to work as a researcher. I played Gabriela Ortiz, Doreen Carwithen, and Camila Cortina Bello. Sitting on top of the piano were the three books behind each of their pieces, including Leah’s Quartet and my own South Side Impresarios. I felt that sharing these stories (and not in a lecture-y kind of way) before playing the music would help audiences feel more connected to the composers and what they were about to hear. I’d been workshopping these ideas for a while, but there was something a bit more spontaneous about my storytelling in the Oxford program, which I really liked and so did the audience.
After the release of Maestra, where is your research and creative work taking you next?
The concerto theme continues! This November, I have another album coming out, this time with the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews. It’s an album of Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral music. I’m playing her Piano Concerto in F minor, which she wrote in 1936. Avril was the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a hugely influential and incredibly talented Victorian-era composer of mixed English and Sierra Leonean descent whose life was cut so short. Avril was so incredibly proud of her father. She dedicated the third movement of her piano concerto to him. The whole piece is so redolent of that quintessential English pastoralism, but she has her own voice. Her sense of harmonic color is so striking. There’s an underlying tension that reflects the anxiety of the interwar era she was writing in. Throughout her career, Avril struggled to find consistent champions in the BBC for her music, so this recording will be monumental for a number of reasons.
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