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Risë Stevens (b. 1913, Bronx, New York - d. 2013, Manhattan, New York) was an American mezzo-soprano opera singer. She was born Risë Gus Steenberg in the Bronx, and as a child she sang on a local radio program. As a teenager, her family moved to Queens and she began appearing in local opera productions, […]
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Leopold Mannes (born 1899, New York, New York; died 1964, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts) was an American musician, educator, and inventor. His parents, David Mannes, violinist and conductor, and Clara Mannes, pianist and daughter of conductor Leopold Damrosch, founded the David Mannes School of Music in 1916. In his youth, Leopold Mannes took music and piano […]
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Clara Mannes (1869-1948) was a German-American pianist and music educator. Clara grew up in Breslau, Germany, and was born into the famous Damrosch musical family; her father Leopold Damrosch was known as a respected violinist, composer, and conductor, and her mother, Helen Von Heimburg, an acclaimed opera singer. The Damrosch family immigrated to the United […]
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" Clara Damrosch Mannes and her husband, David Mannes, formed the first touring professional violin-piano concert duo, according to Martin. Mannes went on to found the Mannes School (later College) of Music in addition to participating in activities such as managing the benefit concert in 1912 for the Music School Settlement of Harlem, a concert that featured James Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra "
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Sekou Sundiata (1948-2007), born Robert Franklin Feaster, was a well known poet and writer. When he developed a love of poetry as a teenager, he changed his name, drawing influence from Sekou Toure, Ghana’s most famous president, and Sundiata from Sundiata Keita, king of Mali-Baraka. Many of Sundiata’s works were influenced by his upbringing in […]
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Charlotte Selver (1901-2003) was a music educator and body awareness instructor born in Germany. In the 1920s, Selver studied piano and was also enrolled in the Dr. Rudolph Bode School for Expressive Movement, but later stopped her musical studies as a pianist after graduating due to her increasing hearing loss. Although this shift in her […]
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Henry Cowell (1897-1965) was considered one of the most innovative American composers of the 20th century. At just fourteen years old, Cowell had a reputation for performing using experimental techniques on the piano. At age seventeen, Cowell studied with musicologist Charles Seeger at the University of California. He persuaded Cowell to create transcriptions of his […]
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David Mannes (1866-1959) was an American violinist, educator, and activist. He was born in New York City, and studied the violin with composer and violinist John Thomas Douglass, the son of a freed slave. His musical upbringing led to the establishment of two music schools. In 1912, he helped found the Colored Music Settlement School, […]
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" Of all Schenker’s pupils and disciples, none was as important for the dissemination of his teachings as Hans Weisse. Weisse seems to be at the forefront of every initiative to promote his teacher’s work, whether as a private tutor, a public lecturer, or an ambassador of music theory. "
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" "New York and the Colored People" was the general topic tor discussion yesterday at the March conference on the evils of pauperism held in the assembly hall of the United Charities Building, 106 East Twenty-second Street. Introduced only by his non-committal subject on the programme, "My Colored Violin Teacher," David Mannes told the story of his first legitimate musical instruction, of his first direction on the right path of musical study, and of how, years later, he tried to pay his debt by inaugurating the Musical School Settlement for Negroes, now advancing through its first season with 150 pupils. "