Biography
Samantha Ege, a pianist devoted to compositions by African-American women, has also built a reputation as a musicologist through her detailed studies of Black female musicians active in Chicago during the years between the world wars. Raised in Surrey, England, she developed an early love for music by playing piano accompaniments to songs broadcast on radio or television, with her parents offering steady encouragement, yet her formal training initially centered on works by European male composers; she nevertheless explored the piano rags of Scott Joplin even though her teachers discouraged them. Ege completed a B.A. with honors at the University of Bristol and spent one year abroad at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where she first encountered music by women composers, starting with the French sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger and then discovering the African-American Chicagoans Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds, whose names had scarcely reached her before. Although musicology remained her chief focus at Bristol, she kept performing on the piano and earned her living as a teacher for ten years across several countries before resuming her studies at the University of York, where she received a PhD in musicology while coming to understand, as she told the Cross-Eyed Pianist on June 27, 2019, "I realised the power in forging a career that bridges both" scholarship and performance. In 2018 she issued her first album, Four Women: Music for solo piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland & Bonds, which presented the world premiere of Ethel Bilsland’s The Birthday Party. Ege has appeared regularly as a lecture-recitalist highlighting Price and other women composers; in 2018 she curated the event “A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance” at the Chicago Symphony Center and has combined performance with research at additional venues in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong, among further locations. She was appointed Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in 2020. Her Barbican debut in London took place in 2021 and featured the British premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Sonata Appassionata; the same year brought the release of Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, and in 2022 she issued the recital album Black Renaissance Woman, containing music by Price, Bonds, Nora Holt, Helen Hagan, and Betty Jackson King, which earned the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society.
Albums
