CALVIN, Carrie A

Carrie A. Calvin was an American composer active in the late nineteenth century. Born in Pennsylvania in 1864, she belongs to the generation of women whose music circulated through the American sheet-music market, especially in the form of short piano pieces intended for domestic and social performance.

Her known surviving work is Iva Waltz, published in 1885 by Will E. Reeves in Ashtabula, Ohio. The piece places her within the American tradition of salon and dance music, a repertory in which women composers were often active but only rarely preserved in detail by later music history. Although little biographical information about Calvin has survived, the publication of Iva Waltz confirms her activity as a composer in the 1880s and preserves her name among American women who contributed to nineteenth-century piano and dance repertory.