Dorothy Rudd Moore
*Dorothy Rudd Moore was born on this date in 1940. She was a Black composer and music educator.
Dorothy Rudd was born in New Castle, Delaware. She was born to a musical family; her mother encouraged her to pursue music studies and explore all her interests, including piano lessons. Moore knew she wanted to become a composer at a young age and took piano lessons as a child at the Wilmington School of Music, where she studied with Harry Andrews.
She learned to play clarinet to join the Howard High all-male band. She was also involved with music theory studies, the high school orchestra and choir, and the church choir. Moore started her undergraduate studies at Howard University as a music education major but later switched to composition, as she constantly invented songs and melodies when she played. She graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor of Music.
Moore received the Lucy Moten Fellowship to study at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in Paris in 1963, Chou Wen-Chung in New York in 1965, and Lola Hayes in 1972. She married cellist and conductor Kermit Moore in 1964.
Throughout her career, her works were commissioned by the nation's top orchestras, including the National Symphony, Opera Ebony, and the Buffalo Philharmonic. Moore was a private music teacher from 1965 to 1966, taught at the Harlem School of the Arts, in 1969 at New York University, and in 1971 at the Bronx Community College. 1968, she co-founded the Society of Black Composers in New York City.
Moore received the Lucy Moten fellowship in 1963 as her first award, followed by many other grants. Performance Records released her works, Dirge and Deliverance and Songs from the Dark Tower in 1981. In 1985, the world premiere of her opera, Frederick Douglass, took place in New York City by Opera Ebony. Between 1988 and 1990, she was on the New York State Council of the Arts music panel. Dorothy Rudd Moore, one of the leading nonwhite women composers of her generation, died on March 30, 2022.
