Undine Smith Moore

Undine Smith was born on the twenty-fifth of August 1904 at Jarratt, Virginia, the third of three daughters of James William Smith — a railroad foreman of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad — and Hardie Turnbull Smith. The family moved to Petersburg, Virginia, in 1908, where she was raised in the AME Zion church and trained at the piano by her mother.

She was admitted at sixteen in 1921 to the Fisk University at Nashville, Tennessee, on a Juilliard Foundation scholarship — the first such scholarship awarded by the Juilliard board — and completed the Bachelor of Arts in music in 1926 under the Fisk choral director John Wesley Work II. She took further study at the Columbia University Teachers College, completing the Master of Arts in 1931 in music education, and at the Juilliard Graduate School in piano performance.

She was appointed in 1927 to the music faculty of the Virginia State College for Negroes at Petersburg — subsequently Virginia State University — and held the position for forty-five years until her retirement in 1972. She founded in 1969 with Altona Trent Johns the Black Music Center at Virginia State University — among the first sustained academic centres for African American musical scholarship in the United States — and directed it until 1972.

She composed across the following four decades over one hundred works — predominantly choral and vocal — among them the cantata Mother to Son on the Langston Hughes (placed in this archive) poem (1955), the cycle Songs of the Heart (1968), and the principal late work — the sixteen-movement oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr on the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive), completed in 1981 and premiered at the Carnegie Hall on the thirteenth of April 1982.

The oratorio was nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

She died at Petersburg on the sixth of February 1989, at eighty-four.

She is honored here as the co-founder of the Black Music Center at Virginia State.