HOLT, Nora Douglas

  Nora Douglas Holt was a composer, singer, music critic and a deep part of the culture of the Harlem Renaissance, but sadly, very little remains of her compositions. She was born Lena Douglas, and her life was one of charting her own path, and making her mark. Her study of music began as a youngster, when she took piano lessons from the age of four, and played the organ in her father’s church in Kansas City. Her skills grew as she did, studying music at Western University in Quindaro, Kansas. She attended the Chicago Musical College, where in 1918, she earned a master’s degree, said to be the first African-American (let alone African-American woman) to earn a master’s in music composition in the United States.

Her thesis in Chicago, a piece for orchestra called Rhapsody on Negro Themes, was among the 200 or so works for orchestra and chamber songs that were lost when they were stolen with her other belongings from storage while she was abroad singing in Europe and Asia. Only two pieces remain, including this one, called “Negro Dance”, a work for solo piano that was fortunately published before the theft.

When she returned from overseas, she turned her attention to music criticism, never returning to composition, or even trying to recreate the lost works. She was a music critic for the Chicago Defender, a Black daily newspaper from 1917-21, and in 1919 co-founded the National Association of Negro Musicians. During the ‘20s, she founded the magazine Music and Poetry, and became friends with members of the Harlem Renaissance, hosting and attending soirees with the leading writers and thinkers of the era.