Ulysses Kay

Ulysses Simpson Kay was born on the seventh of January 1917 at Tucson, Arizona, the son of Ulysses Simpson Kay Sr. — a barber — and Elizabeth Davis Kay, the sister of the cornetist Joseph “King” Oliver (placed in this archive) of New Orleans. His maternal uncle introduced him to the cornet at six, and to the operatic recordings of his New Orleans collection at eight.

He was admitted at sixteen in 1934 to the University of Arizona on a music scholarship and completed the Bachelor of Music in 1938 under Charles Sederholm. He took further study at the Eastman School of Music at Rochester under Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers — completing the Master of Music in 1940 — and at the Yale University Graduate School of Music under Paul Hindemith in 1942.

He served the United States Navy band at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station, Rhode Island between 1942 and 1945. He returned at the war’s end to the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood under Hindemith on a Rosenwald Fellowship.

He was awarded the Rome Prize in 1949 and the Fulbright Fellowship in 1949 and 1950 simultaneously — the latter taking him to the American Academy at Rome for three years until 1952.

He was named in September 1958 one of the four composers of the joint State Department–American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Soviet Cultural Exchange Tour — alongside Roy Harris, Peter Mennin and Roger Sessions — and travelled in October–November 1958 to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev and Tbilisi as the first African American composer-in-residence of a touring American cultural exchange.

He was appointed in 1968 distinguished professor of music at the Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, the position he held for twenty years until 1988.

He composed across the following forty years five operas — among them Frederick Douglass (1991), on a libretto by Donald Dorr on the life of the abolitionist (placed in this archive) — over twenty orchestral works, and over a hundred choral and chamber works.

He died at Englewood, New Jersey on the twentieth of May 1995, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the first African American composer of the State Department cultural exchange.