The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3051
Marjorie Rambeau
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Marjorie Burnet Rambeau was an American film and stage actress. She began her stage career at age 12, and appeared in several silent films before debuting in her first sound film, Her Man . She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in Primrose Path and Torch Song , and received the 1955 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in A Man Called Peter and The View from Pompey's Head.
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Adele Sandrock
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Adele Sandrock was a German-Dutch actress. After a successful theatrical career, she became one of the first German movie stars. Early life Sandrock was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the daughter of the German merchant Eduard Sandrock and his Dutch wife, Johanna Simonetta ten Hagen . With sister Wilhelmine and brother Christian , she grew up in Rotterdam, and, after her parents' divorce on 15 November 1869, in Berlin.
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Helene Weyl
1893 - 1948 (55 years)
Friederike Bertha Helene Weyl was a German writer and translator. She was married to the mathematician Hermann Weyl. Life Weyl was born on 30 March 1893 in Ribnitz, Germany. She was the daughter of the Jewish country doctor Bruno Joseph and his wife Bertha. Her father was born in Pomerania, and her mother came from a well-established Mecklenburg family. Weyl and her younger sister were raised atheists.
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Liza Lehmann
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Liza Lehmann was an English soprano and composer, known for her vocal compositions. After vocal studies with Alberto Randegger and Jenny Lind, and composition studies with teachers including Hamish MacCunn, Lehmann made her singing debut in 1885 in London and pursued a concert career for nearly a decade. In 1894, she married and left the stage. She then concentrated on composing music, becoming known for her songs, including many children's songs. She also composed several pieces for the stage and wrote a textbook on singing. In 1910, she toured the United States, where she accompanied her own songs in recitals.
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Felice Rix-Ueno
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Felice "Lizzie" Rix-Ueno was an Austrian textile, wallpaper, and craft designer. She lived in Japan, and became an influential figure in the Japanese modern art scene. Early life and education Felice Rix was born in Vienna. She studied at University of Applied Arts Vienna and Josef Hoffmann was her teacher.
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Margaret Farrand Thorp
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Margaret Farrand Thorp was a writer, English professor, and journalist. Thorp published six books, including five biographies. She is most noted for her 1939 work America at the Movies and her 1949 work Female Persuasion: Six Strong-Minded Women.
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Florence Price
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Florence Beatrice Price was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her work...
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Toni Stolper
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Antonie "Toni" Stolper was an Austrian-German economist and journalist. She fled Europe and immigrated to the United States in 1933 and moved to Canada in 1977. Biography Stolper was born Antonie Kassowitz, daughter of and , in Vienna, Austria in 1890. She studied law in Vienna and economics in Berlin, Germany, earning her doctorate under Heinrich Herkner in 1917. In 1921, she married Gustav Stolper, the editor of a journal called Der Österreichische Volkswirt . In 1925, the couple moved to Berlin, where Gustav Stolper established a new paper, Der Deutsche Volkswirt . Toni Stolper wrote regu...
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Elisabeth Schumann
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Elisabeth Schumann was a German lyric soprano who sang in opera, operetta, oratorio, and lieder. She left a substantial legacy of recordings. Career Born in Merseburg, Schumann trained for a singing career in Berlin and Dresden. She made her stage debut in Hamburg in 1909. Her initial career started in the lighter soubrette roles that expanded into mostly lyrical roles, some coloratura roles, and even a few dramatic roles. She remained at the Hamburg State Opera until 1919, also singing during the 1914/1915 season at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
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Stefi Geyer
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Stefi Geyer was a Hungarian violinist who was considered one of the leading violinists of her generation. Biography Born in 1888 in Budapest, she was the daughter of Josef Geyer, a police doctor who played the violin himself. When she was 5 years old she started playing the violin, with remarkable results for someone who had not practiced at all. She subsequently studied under Jenő Hubay.
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Cass Elliot
1941 - 1974 (33 years)
Ellen Naomi Cohen , known professionally as Cass Elliot, was an American singer and voice actress. She was also known as "Mama Cass", but she reportedly hated the name. She was a member of the singing group the Mamas & the Papas. After the group broke up, Elliot released five solo albums. She received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Performance for "Monday, Monday" . In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her work with the Mamas & the Papas.
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Helene Chadwick
1897 - 1940 (43 years)
Helene Chadwick was an American actress in silent and in early sound films. Early life and career Chadwick was born in the small town of Chadwicks, New York, which was named for her great-grandfather. Her parents were George W. Chadwick Jr. and Marie Louise Norton Chadwick. Her mother was a singer who performed on the stage and her father was a business man.
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Marilyn Monroe
1926 - 1962 (36 years)
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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Ethel Clayton
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Ethel Clayton was an American actress of the silent film era. Early years Born in Champaign, Illinois, Clayton attended St. Elizabeth's school in Chicago. Career Clayton debuted on stage as a professional as a member of the chorus in a production at the Chicago Opera House. After that, she worked with stock theater companies in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
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Nadia Reisenberg
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Nadia Reisenberg Sherman was an American pianist of Lithuanian birth. Biography Nadia Reisenberg was born in Vilnius to a Jewish family. Her parents were Aaron and Rachel Reisenberg. Her sister Anna was born two years later, and Clara in 1911 who later took the married name of Clara Rockmore and became renowned for her virtuosity on the theremin. The three sisters remained extremely close. When Nadia was six, her uncle Paul sent the family a piano, and Nadia immediately knew she would be at the keyboard for the rest of her life. Her talent demanded that the family move to St. Petersburg for ...
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Chung Chil-sung
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Chung Chil-sung , also known by her pen name Geumjuk , was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Biography She was born in Daegu province, one of twenty three provinces of the Joseon kingdom. It was said that she came from a poor family. Her exact birth year is questioned often as others say she was born in 1902, 1905, and 1908, but others say that 1897 seems to be more appropriate. There are no details about her childhood or her family clan.
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Marie Tempest
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Dame Mary Susan Etherington, , known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain.
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Liane Haid
1895 - 2000 (105 years)
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star. Biography Juliane Haid was born in Vienna on 16 August 1895, the first child to Georg Haid and Juliane Haid . She had two younger sisters, Grit, who also became an actress, and Johanna .
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Winifred Copperwheat
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Winifred May Copperwheat was an English classical viola player and teacher. She studied under English violist Lionel Tertis at the Royal Academy of Music. Tertis later said after one of her recitals, that she had "played like an angel".
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Tosca Kramer
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Tosca Berger Kramer was a New Zealand-born American violinist and violist. Kramer, along with her parents, was instrumental in bringing classical music performance and instruction to the state of Oklahoma.
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Annelies Kupper
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Annelies Kupper , was a German operatic soprano, particularly associated with Mozart and the German repertory. Kupper was born at Glatz in Lower Silesia. She studied in Breslau and was a music teacher there before making her operatic debut in 1935. She then appeared in Schwerin , Weimar , Hamburg , Munich . She sang Eva in Die Meistersinger at the Bayreuth festival, in 1944, and returned as Elsa in Lohengrin in 1960. She created Danae in Richard Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae at the Salzburg festival, in 1952.
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Myrna Sharlow
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Myrna Docia Sharlow was an American soprano who had an active performance career in operas and concerts during the 1910s through the 1930s. She began her career in 1912 with the Boston Opera Company and became one of Chicago's more active sopranos from 1915–1920, and again in 1923–1924 and 1926–1927. She sang with several other important American opera companies during her career, including one season at the Metropolitan Opera. She made only a handful of opera appearances in Europe during her career, most notably singing in the English premiere of Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at Covent Garden in 1914.
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Ania Dorfmann
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Ania Dorfmann was a Russian-American pianist and teacher, who taught at the Juilliard School in New York for many years and was the first of only a very few women pianists to play or record under Arturo Toscanini.
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Rosina Buckman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Rosina Buckman was a New Zealand soprano who became a prima donna during World War I and later a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music. She was born in Blenheim, grew up mostly in the North Island and went to England when still a teenager to get a formal singing education from Charles Swinnerton Heap. After Heap's death, she moved to the Birmingham School of Music. Graduating in 1903, she could immediately sustain herself from singing engagements but fell ill and returned to New Zealand the following year. She advanced her career in the country of her birth and had her operatic debut in 1905.
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Miriam Bernstein-Cohen
1895 - 1991 (96 years)
Miriam Bernstein-Cohen , 1895–1991, was an Israeli actress, director, poet and translator. Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was born in Kishinev, Russian Empire. Her father was the doctor and community activist Jacob Bernstein-Kogan. She grew up in Kharkov. After training as a medical doctor she enrolled in drama school. She studied with Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow in 1918 before returning to Moldova as an actress, where she worked under the name Maria Alexandrova.
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Judy Canova
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Judy Canova , born Juliette Canova , was an American comedienne, actress, singer, and radio personality. She appeared on Broadway and in films. She hosted her own self-titled network radio program, a popular series broadcast from 1943 to 1955.
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Mary Jarred
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Mary Jarred was an English opera singer of the mid-twentieth century. She is sometimes classed as a mezzo-soprano and sometimes as a contralto. Biography Jarred was born in Brotton, Yorkshire, , and studied at the Royal College of Music.
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Lucille Bogan
1897 - 1948 (51 years)
Lucille Bogan was an American classic female blues singer and songwriter, among the first to be recorded. She also recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Music critic Ernest Borneman noted that Bogan was one of "the big three of the blues", along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Many of Bogan's songs have been recorded by later blues and jazz musicians.
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Hibari Misora
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Hibari Misora was a Japanese singer, actress and cultural icon. She received a Medal of Honor for her contributions to music and for improving the welfare of the public, and was the first woman to receive the People's Honour Award, which was conferred posthumously for giving the public hope and encouragement after World War II.
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Eleanor Sophia Smith
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Eleanor Sophia Smith was an American composer and music educator. She was one of the founders of Chicago's Hull House Music School, and headed its music department from 1893 to 1936. Born into a musical family, Smith taught herself to play the piano and later became a classically trained musician. Earning a teaching degree, she began publishing music compositions for children using the philosophy of Friedrich Fröbel, advocating for less memorization and drilling and more attention to intuitive appreciation of music. Studying composition and voice in Germany, she also toured the country observ...
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Carrie Tubb
1876 - 1976 (100 years)
Caroline Elizabeth Tubb was an English soprano of the early 20th century, and later a teacher of singing at the Guildhall School of Music. She made her debut at London's Royal Opera House in 1910, where she appeared in such works as Elektra and Hänsel und Gretel. With Thomas Beecham's opera company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she sang in Die Fledermaus, The Marriage of Figaro and The Tales of Hoffmann. Later, she mostly appeared on the concert platform, including at 54 Prom concerts and at the major British music festivals. She also made some early recordings. Around 1930 she retired from singing and began teaching.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was a Czechoslovak concert pianist and piano teacher, a professor at the Prague Academy of Arts. Her students included Ivan Moravec. Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was the mother of pianist Pavel Štěpán.
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Frances James
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Frances James was a Canadian soprano who specialized in concert repertoire. She worked prolifically as a performer on CBC Radio and as a recitalist from the late 1920s through the 1950s; premiering works by numerous Canadian composers of note and championing works by contemporary international composers. Her performances were noted for their musical intelligence and sophistication. Her singing was admired by several important composers, including Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud. While her performances, both live and on radio/disc, were mainly from the concert repertoire, ...
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Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter was an American soprano and composer. She was born in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Jonathan and Mary E. Hinds Turner. Turner graduated from Burlington High School in Burlington, Iowa, and the Boston College of Music, and then worked as a voice teacher at Wellesley College and performed in churches. In 1881 she married Sumner Salter. She died in Orangeburg, New York. She was one of the founding members of the American Society of Women Composers.
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Charlotte Burton
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Charlotte E. Burton was an American silent film actress. Biography Early life and education Charlotte E. Burton was born on May 30, 1881, in San Francisco, California. However there is some debate on her date of birth; some sources state she was born ten years later, on May 30, 1891; and other sources state she died at age 48 .
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Mildred Lund Tyson
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Mildred Lund Tyson was an American choral director, composer, organist, and soprano. Biography Tyson was born in Moline, Illinois, to Mary Helena Anderson and Oscar Fredrick Lund. She married Harold Canfield Tyson in 1927 and they had a daughter, Barbara, in 1930.
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Helen Hopekirk
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Helen Hopekirk was a Scottish pianist and composer who lived and worked in Boston. Life and career Helen Hopekirk was born in Portobello, Edinburgh in Scotland, a daughter of music shop owners Adam and Helen Hopekirk. She studied music with George Lichtenstein and Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie, and made her debut as a soloist in 1874 with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestral Society. After other successful performances and the death of her father, she relocated to study composition with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig. After successful debuts in Leipzig and London, she began regular concert to...
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Lola Gjoka
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Lola Gjoka Aleksi was an Albanian pianist during the period of the Communist regime. Life Gjoka was born in Sevastopol in 1910, into an Albanian family. She began learning the piano at the age of six, and her success was such that her father arranged for her to have lessons from the pianist Karalovy. In 1932 her family moved to Korçë, where Gjoka worked as an accompanist for singers including the soprano Tefta Tashko-Koço, the Albanian folk singer Marie Kraja, and Mihal Ciko.
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Luella Gear
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Luella Gear was an American actress. She appeared in numerous films, TV series and theatrical productions throughout the 1910s to the 1960s Early life Gear was born in New York in 1897. She attended the Spence School and was educated in Brussels, Belgium.
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Fanny Arthur Robinson
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
Fanny Arthur Robinson was an English pianist, music educator and composer who spent most of her career in Dublin, Ireland. Biography Fanny Robinson was born in Southampton and studied the piano in London with William Sterndale Bennett and Sigismund Thalberg. She performed in Dublin in February 1849 where she met her future husband Joseph Robinson, conductor, composer and chorister at St. Patrick's Cathedral. They married on 17 July 1849. She appeared as a pianist in London and Paris, and in 1856 made her performing debut in Ireland. She took a teaching position at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in the same year.
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Judith Raskin
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Judith Raskin was an American lyric soprano, renowned for her fine voice as well as her acting. Life and work Raskin was born in New York to Harry A. Raskin, a high school music teacher, and Lillian Raskin, a grade school teacher. Her father aroused her childhood interest in music, leading her to study violin and piano, before she turned her focus to singing. In 1945, she graduated from Roosevelt High School, Yonkers and attended Smith College, where she majored in music. It was during her college years that she began taking singing lessons, which she continued after graduation in order to...
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Julia Perry
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Julia Amanda Perry was an American classical composer and teacher who combined European classical and neo-classical training with her African-American heritage. Life and education Born in Lexington, Kentucky, as a child Perry moved with her family to Akron, Ohio. She went on to study voice, piano, and composition at the Westminster Choir College 1943–48. It was there that she received her B.M. and M.M. She continued on to her graduate studies at Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, where she was a student of Luigi Dallapiccola, and then later studied at the Juilliard School of Music. Around...
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Clara Kathleen Rogers
1844 - 1931 (87 years)
Clara Kathleen Barnett Rogers , was an English-born American composer, singer, writer and music educator. Early life and education Rogers was born in Cheltenham, England, into a musical family. Her grandfather, Robert Lindley, was a cellist; her father, John Barnett, was an opera composer and was the first music teacher his children had; her mother, Eliza, was a singer. At the age of twelve, her family moved to Germany to further the musical education of the children. Clara was denied acceptance to the Leipzig Conservatory, but that decision was changed in 1857 in view of her talent, making her the youngest student ever admitted.
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Alicia Urreta
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
Alicia Urreta was a Mexican pianist, music educator and composer. Biography Alicia Urreta was born in Veracruz, Veracruz. In 1952 she entered the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City, studying harmony with Rodolfo Halffter, and other topics under Hernández Moncada, León Mariscal, and Sandor Roth. In 1969, she studied with Jean-Etienne Marie at Schola Cantorum of Paris, France. She also studied piano instruction from Alfred Brendel and Alicia de Larrocha. She later worked as a concert pianist for the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. She also taught at the University of Mexico and was an...
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Albertine Morin-Labrecque
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Albertine Morin-Labrecque was a Canadian pianist, soprano, composer, and music educator. Her compositional output includes 4 ballets, 2 comic operas, the Chinese opera Pas-chu, 2 concertos for two pianos, the symphonic poem Le Matin, numerous symphonic works, and compositions for band. Her works have been published by a variety of companies. A square and a street in Montreal were named after her in 1984.
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Emma Lomax
1873 - 1963 (90 years)
Louise Emily Lomax was an English composer and pianist. She was born in Brighton, daughter of the curator of Brighton Free Library and Museum. She studied at the Brighton School of Music and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying composition with Frederick Corder and the clarinet. She was a Goring Thomas Scholar from 1907 to 1910 and won the Charles Lucas Medal in 1910, awarded for her Theme and Variations for orchestra.
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