Piano concerto in c minor

Composer: HAGAN, Helen Eugenia
  • Helen Hagan composed this one-movement work in 1912, the same year she graduated from the Yale University School of Music, where she studied piano and composition.1
  • Hagan performed this work with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra in 1912.2
  • Hagan created a two-piano version of this concerto which she performed many times throughout her career.3
  • Helen Hagan performed her concerto an “All Colored Composers Concert” at Orchestra Hall in Chicago on April 25, 1915.4
  • This work is one of the first concertos composed by an African American woman.5
  • This concerto is thought to be Hagan’s only surviving composition; other piano works and a violin sonata are currently lost.6

Sources

  1. Lucy Caplan, liner notes to Black Renaissance Woman, Samantha Ege, Lontano Records Ltd. 145, CD, 2022.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Jessie Carney Smith, “Helen Eugenia Hagan,” in Notable Black American Women, Book II, ed. Smith (New York: Gale Research, 1992), 270-271.
  5. David Metzer, “Hagan, Helen Eugenia,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed May 26, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000049459.
  6. Ibid.

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