Maud Cuney-Hare
*Maud Hare was born on this date in 1874. She was a Black musician and writer.
From Galveston, TX, Maud Cuney's parents were Adelina (Dowdy) and Norris Wright Cuney. After graduating Central High School in Galveston in 1890, she studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music. While there, she successfully resisted the pressure that white students exerted on the school's administrators to have her barred from living in the dormitory.
Hare also studied privately with biographers Emil Ludwig and Edwin Klare. She taught music at the Texas Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute for Colored Youths in 1897 and 1898; at the settlement program of the Institutional Church of Chicago during 1900 and 1901; and at Prairie View State College (now Prairie View A&M University), Texas, in 1903 and 1904.
As a folklorist and music historian, she was particularly interested in African and early American music. She collected songs in Mexico, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Cuba and was the first music scholar to direct public attention to Creole music. She contributed to many news publications, including Musical Quarterly, Musical Observer, Musical America, and Christian Science Monitor; for years, she edited a column on music and the arts for The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
After marrying William P. Hare in 1906, she moved to Boston and traveled in the East, giving recitals and lectures. She participated in the artistic life there and founded the Musical Art Studio to promote concerts and a little theater movement in the Black community. Antar, her play about an Arabian Negro poet, was staged in Boston under her direction in 1926. She wrote Creole Songs 1921; The Message of the Trees 1918, a collection of poetry; and Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People 1913, a biography of her father. She is best remembered for unearthing highly respected Negro Musicians and Their Music in 1936.
She died in Boston on February 13, 1936, and was buried beside her parents in Lake View Cemetery in Galveston.
Dictionary of American Negro Biography
Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds.,
(New York: Norton, 1982)
