Samantha Ege

musicology

Dr Ege is a leading scholar and interpreter of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Her work illuminates Price in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance and Black women's dynamic networks of advocacy, empowerment, and uplift therein. Her first book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene, and first edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price, are important culminations of the research she has shared in journal articles, lecture-recitals, paper presentations, and more.
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Dr Ege has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, and Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. She has also contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory and is currently working on contributions to a critical study of Stephen Foster and The Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States.
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South Side Impresarios was awarded the 2024 Society for American Music H. Earle Johnson Publication Subvention Award and 2023 American Musicological Society Publications Committee Subvention Grant. She is also the recipient of competitive awards and fellowships such as the 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award, 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award, 2019 Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship, and a 2019 Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship.
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Dr Ege is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020-2022). She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York and a BA with honours in Music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student.
performance

Dr Ege is a concert pianist who specializes in the music of 20th and 21st century composers. Her performances bring her research to life, sounding new narratives that are so often unheard in the modern-day concert hall. Dr Ege seeks to communicate the diversity of classical music's past, present, and future through her performances, and foster a sense of belonging for everyone. As a result, her performances take on different formats, sometimes entwining narration and conversation alongside more conventional programming.

Dr Ege released her debut album in 2018 called Four Women (Wave Theory Records). She released her critically acclaimed second album in 2021 called Fantasie Nègre with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.). Her third and fourth albums (both with Lorelt) came out in 2022: Black Renaissance Woman and Homage with the Castle of our Skins string quartet. She is currently working on two new album projects: Maestra: Julia Perry and Doreen Carwithen Piano Concertos (Lontano Orchestra/Lorelt) and the orchestral music of Avril Coleridge-Taylor (BBC Philharmonic/Resonus Classics).
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As a concert pianist, Dr Ege made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (Michael Church, iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. In her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music she gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre set. In 2018, she made her international lecture-recitalist debut at the Chicago Symphony Center with her event A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance. She has performed across the UK, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. She has also played with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Oakland Symphony Orchestra, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, and Yale Philharmonia.
storytelling

Whether sharing the Black Renaissance repertoire of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, or displaying the postmodernisms of Undine Smith Moore and Julia Perry, or championing the British concertos of Avril Coleridge-Taylor and Doreen Carwithen, or celebrating the contemporary works of Bongani Ndodana-Breen and Odaline de la Martinez, storytelling is at the heart of every note. Dr Ege's vast and varied programs evince the dialogue between research and repertoire; they are all about exploring the narratives that shape our communities and connect us as individuals.
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Dr Ege's storytelling extends a number of collaborations with the BBC, in particular her BBC Radio 3 documentaries: "Florence Price and the Black Female Fellowship" (2022) and "Undine Smith Moore: The Dean of Black Women Composers" (2024). She has further shared the stories of brilliant historical Black women in classical music as both a TV and radio guest for the BBC Proms, a guest and performer on BBC Radio 3 In Tune, and a presenter on BBC Radio 3 Inside Music. She is excited for future collaborations with the BBC Philharmonic and BBC Radio 3, which entail bringing the music of Avril Coleridge-Taylor to new audiences.
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As a public historian, she engages an array of topics, from the transformative impact of this work along her own journey to poignant tales of classical music-making under Jim Crow and apartheid. She has written for the New York Times, Guardian, and New Statesman, as well as Gramophone, I Care If You Listen, Pianist, and International Piano.
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Dr Ege writes and performs with a goal to ask and answer: what can these lesser told stories in classical music teach us today? This question impels the public-facing dimensions of her work; she readily engages with TV, radio, podcasts, etc., to bring these conversations into spaces outside of the academy and concert hall.