Black Renaissance Woman: Meet Musicologist-Pianist Samantha Ege
It is part of All Classical Portland’s mission to expand and advance knowledge of and appreciation for classical music. If you’re just starting to discover music outside the traditional classical canon, there’s no better composer to start with than that African American 20th-century composer Florence Price, whose music has been enjoying a recent resurgence in concert performances and recordings.
Dr. Samantha Ege of Oxford University is a leading specialist on Florence Price, whose work she has been studying since 2009. Dr. Ege is a researcher, a writer, and a pianist, and equally brilliant in all these areas of expression. In addition to her virtuosic technique and stylistic sensitivity, she brings a musicologist’s scholarly analysis to her interpretations of Florence Price’s piano music.
I met Dr. Ege last November at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, where she presented a lecture-recital and appeared as a panelist. As All Classical’s Music Researcher, I recently had the privilege of chatting with her about her her work on Florence Price and the artistic flowering of Black musical life in midcentury Chicago. Read on to learn about Dr. Ege’s career and research, and about her new album Black Renaissance Woman, coming out in March 2022.
