Helen Walker-Hill
*Helen Walker-Hill was born on this date in 1936. She was a white-Canadian pianist and musicologist who specialized in honoring Black women composers' music.
Helen Siemens was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She received her early musical training from her mother, Margaret Siemens, and continued piano studies with Emma Endres Kountz in Toledo, Ohio. She received her B.A. degree from the University of Toledo (1957) and was a Fulbright fellow at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris in France, where she studied with Nadia Boulanger (1958); on the ship she met George Walker. Siemens married George Walker in 1960; they divorced in 1975. The marriage produced two sons, the violinist and composer Gregory T.S. Walker and the playwright Ian Walker. From 1981 to 1991, she married Robert Hadley Hill, a teacher in Colorado.
She earned an M.A. in musicology from Smith College (1965) and a DMA in piano performance from the University of Colorado (1981), where, from 1983 to 1990, she was an assistant professor adjunct on the piano faculty. From 1993 to 1998, she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. She also taught at Muhlenberg College. From 1987 on, wanting to use the music of Black women composers in her piano performance and teaching, Walker-Hill dedicated herself to uncovering the material. She utilized secondary sources and numerous archives, conducted interviews with composers, and engaged in voluminous correspondence with individuals and institutions. She had a 1995–96 Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
In 1996–1997, Walker-Hill was a Rockefeller resident fellow in the humanities at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), Columbia College. Her lecture "Rediscovering Heritage: The Music of Black Women Composers" was widely published and featured on National Public Radio. She compiled and edited the anthology Black Women Composers: A Century of piano music, 1893-1990 (1992); the unprecedented volume contains scores and biographical information for Estelle D. Ricketts, Anna Gardner Goodwin, L. Viola Kinney, Amanda Aldridge (pseud. Montague Ring), Florence B. Price, Mary Lou Williams, Julia Perry, Undine Smith Moore, Betty Jackson King, Philippa Duke Schuyler, Tania León, Margaret Bonds, Lena McLin, Valerie Capers, Regina A. Harris Baiocchi, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Joyce Solomon, Mable Bailey, and Zenobia Powell Perry.
In 1995, the CBMR published Walker-Hill's Piano Music by Black Women Composers: A Catalog of Solo and Ensemble Works. She and her son Gregory Walker recorded the CD Kaleidoscope: Music of Black American Women (1995). She continued traveling throughout the United States to locate and interview composers. She edited the Vivace Press series Music by African American Women. She published four volumes of music—pieces by Rachel Eubanks (two vols., Vivace, 1995, and Hildegard, 2003), by Nora Holt (Vivace, 2001), and by Irene Britton Smith (Vivace, 2001). In 2002, she published her landmark study From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music, which includes some previously unknown names and more familiar ones.
She donated most of her taped interviews with composers, scores, photos, and other research materials to the CBMR Library and Archives as the Helen Walker-Hill Collection. In 2005, the CBMR received a $94,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to compile a detailed finding aid to the Helen Walker-Hill Collection as part of a project to inventory the papers of three major women scholars: Eileen Southern, Dena J. Epstein, and Helen Walker-Hill. In 2006, Walker-Hill consulted with the CBMR on producing a concert of piano, vocal, and chamber works from her collection. The American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado Boulder also holds materials and organizes music performances. Helen Walker-Hill died on August 8, 2013.
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