1907–1999

Irene Britton Smith

Irene Britton Smith was a Black American composer (also of Crow and Cherokee descent) who wrote only thirty-six compositions, including nineteen pieces of vocal music. Her compositional output was limited because she composed not as a vocation but as an avocation: she worked as an elementary school teacher and only studied music in her free time. In fact, she was prevented from getting a college music degree in her youth because her family didn’t have the money. It wasn’t until age thirty-six that she earned her Bachelor of Music degree from the American Conservatory of Music, having taken one course a year for eleven years. She also earned a master’s degree in composition from DePaul University, studied composition at Juilliard (while on yearlong sabbatical from her teaching position), and spent a summer studying with Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau Summer School in France.

Smith was humble about her compositional efforts. She was reluctant to consider herself a “real” composer—certainly “not like Margaret Bonds,” she once said, referring to a fellow Black woman composer from Chicago—and for this reason, she didn’t publish her music. “I’m too critical of my compositions,” she wrote. “I’m my own worst enemy.” The late musicologist Helen Walker-Hill, in her book From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music, aptly described Smith as “representative of the unknown women who compose for their own satisfaction, with little thought of public recognition.”

Still, Smith’s works deserve to be recognized today. Her self-criticism belies the high quality of her music. Smtih’s works are exquisitely crafted and profoundly affecting—richly melodic and lyrical, with subtle contrapuntal lines and harmonies evocative of French neoclassical music. (Gabriel Fauré and César Franck were two of her favorite composers, and you can hear their influence on her musical style.) 

Smith stopped composing in 1962, at the age of fifty-five, but music remained at the center of her life. After retiring from teaching in 1978, she worked as a docent for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at elementary schools, continuing to bring together her two lifelong passions: music and education.  

Additional Resources

Did you know?

Smith taught in the Chicago public schools for forty-two years.

Video Recordings

Tenor Lunga Eric Hallam and pianist Shannon McGinnis perform "Why Fades a Dream?" from Dream Cycle (1947), Smith's cycle of four songs based on poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The performance occurred as part of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago's 2022 Collaborative Works Festival: The Song of Chicago (Concert II—Music & Poetry).
Soprano Amber Cierra Merritt performs Smith's "Over the Hill" from Dream Cycle (1947), Smith's cycle of four songs based on poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Accessing Scores

Irene Britton Smith’s song scores are only accessible via her papers at Columbia College Chicago. However, one song—”Why Fades a Dream?” from Dream Cycle—has been published in modern edition in An Anthology of African and African Diaspora Songs, ed. Louise Toppin and Scott Piper (Videmus African American Art Song Series, 2021).

Other Composers

England

Rebecca Clarke

Rebecca Clarke was one of most distinguished and gifted British composers in the first half of the 20th century. Born to an American father and

Read More >>
United States

Florence Price

Florence Price was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who was born in Little Rock, Ark., and spent much of much of her career

Read More >>
Spain

Joaquín Rodrigo

Joaquín Rodrigo was one of the most significant figures in 20th-century Spanish music. A gifted composer, pianist, academic, and music critic, he cultivated a neoclassical

Read More >>