“It was 1989, and Helen Walker-Hill, a member of the piano faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, was working on a book titled ‘From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music,’ ” writes Becca Martin-Brown in Sunday’s (2/14) Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock). “She wanted to interview a Chicago teacher named Irene Britton Smith, [who] had reportedly known African-American composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. What she discovered brought a completely unknown African-American composer into the spotlight. And Smith’s work is now a topic of interest for Arkansas Philharmonic musicians Er-Gene Kahng and Nathan Carterette, who will perform her Sonata for Violin and Piano Feb. 19…. Smith earned a bachelor’s of music in composition from the American Conservatory of Music, studied at New York’s Juilliard School and received a master’s degree in musical composition from DePaul University. Her life’s work was teaching—more than 42 years—in the Chicago Public Schools…. She also created about 30 pieces of classical music…. Rediscovering music like Smith’s is ‘a confirmation and acknowledgement of a truth, of an identity that was previously unavailable, unknown and stigmatized to successive generations,’ says Kahng.”
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