NEWS

Update: This performance has been moved to the Alumni Music Center Recial Hall.

NEWBERRY — Dr. Sarah Masterson, associate professor of piano and music theory at Newberry College, will perform a recital Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 7:30 p.m. in the Alumni Music Center Recial Hall. The program will consist entirely of music by the late composer Philippa Schuyler, including lost pieces transcribed by a senior music student. The performance will be free and open to the public.

Schuyler was a mixed-race pianist, author and journalist, most of whose compositions were never recorded or published due to her early death at 35 during the Vietnam War. Masterson, whose research focuses on 20th-century American women composers, has spent the last several years researching and reconstructing Schuyler’s lost works. She recorded Schuyler’s unpublished “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” for an album, which was released in April 2022 by Centaur Records.

Tuesday’s program will include pieces which Schuyler composed between 1958 and 1960, as well as selections from “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

“Of particular interest is that I will be playing one of three short pieces by her that Paul Johnson, senior violin performance major, has transcribed from audio recordings,” said Masterson. “The scores for those three pieces are lost. The fairly poor-quality audio recording is all that's left, so he's essentially created a new written copy so that then can be studied and performed.”

“The recordings I’m using were made by Schuyler herself in 1960,” said Johnson. “The audio that features ‘African Rhapsody’ and ‘Nubian Legend’ was recorded directly from a lecture recital that has no date.

“Schuyler's music can be very complex, but I had an easier time with some works than others,” he added. “The greatest issue I've had to bear is dealing with the quality of the recordings. The warping of the audio would make it a bit more challenging to decipher the key center of the music, and technical passages sounded fuzzy at times.”

For more information on Masterson’s revival of Schuyler’s works, click here.