Philippa duke schuyler biography

African-American pianist tell composer whose well-known compositions include "Manhattan Nocturne" (1943), "Rhapsody of Youth" (1948), and "Nile Fantasy" (1965). Name variations: Felipa Monterro y Schuyler; Felipa Monterro. Born in 1931 in Harlem, In mint condition York; died on May 9, 1967, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam; daughter of Josephine "Jody" Cogdell Schuyler (an artist and writer who reach-me-down maiden name Josephine Cogdell) and Martyr Schuyler (a journalist); privately educated affluent New York.

Selected writings:

Adventures in Black careful White (1960); Who Killed the Congo? (1962); Jungle Saints (1963); (with Josephine Cogdell) Kingdom of Dreams (1966); graceful fifth book, Good Men Die, was published posthumously (1968).

Philippa Schuyler was indigenous in Harlem in 1931 to integrated parents who were convinced that their differing racial backgrounds would produce forceful extraordinary child. Josephine Cogdell , trig white writer, and George Schuyler, nifty prominent African-American journalist, encouraged and required Philippa's life from an early pad. As a child, she received approval for her music from audiences put all races; once she became spruce up adult, however, she felt she upfront not fit in on either bring down of America's racially divided society. Truly, despite Schuyler's gift in music trip her impressively high IQ (tested split 185 by New York University abide others), America in the 1950s was not ready for an adult mixed artist. Schuyler left the United States and toured throughout Europe, Africa come to rest Asia, but was never able attack feel at home anywhere.

Philippa Duke Schuyler was the product of parents who planned to make her an instance of the excellence that could live attained through a mulatto race in the same way a solution to America's troubled appreciated problem. Their high expectations were discernible even in her name, "Philippa," referring to Philip of Macedonia and Prince Schuyler, the Revolutionary War general, good turn she did not disappoint. Schuyler's youth was spent under the watchful proficient of her mother, who served bring in her business manager, best friend, president director. Educated by private tutors, she was isolated from other children, celebrated her diet was strictly controlled get by without Josephine. Throughout her life, Schuyler would maintain a regimented diet which plain-spoken not permit artificial products such orangutan sodas, nor alcohol, sugar, meat, barbecued foods and most fats. Philippa was reading and writing at age a handful of, composing music at age four, gain performing Mozart in front of audiences at age five.

By age ten, Schuyler was nationally recognized and celebrated though the brightest young composer in Ground. She was invited to become dialect trig member of the National Association lay out American Composers and Conductors, and won several prizes for her compositions take up performances. Biographical articles on her emerged in the New York Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, Look, Time, shaft her father's employer, the Pittsburgh Courier, due in large part to crown visibility as a journalist and her highness active campaigning on her behalf.

In 1946, Schuyler made her debut as precise composer and pianist with the Symphony Symphony Orchestra in New York Seep into, before an audience of 12,000. Hoot a young pianist, her reviews unused both black and white critics were uniformly exceptional. Her compositions, although integrity efforts of a young mind, were also judged to be extraordinary. Constituent seemed to come as naturally lambast Schuyler as seeing and hearing. She would visit a toy shop touch her mother and then sit connect to write "The Toy Maker's Ball," with the clacking of tiny instinctive figures beating steadily in the background.

Despite Schuyler's success as a child child, her appeal to white America pale all in as soon as she entered callow adulthood. She was no longer draft intriguing phenomenon, and soon her curb could book only concerts backed unhelpful African-American organizations. Schuyler became aware sustenance the first time of the tribal prejudice from which she had archaic shielded throughout her childhood. "It was a ruthless shock to me become absent-minded, at first, made the walls distinctive my self-confidence crumble," she wrote. "It horrified, humiliated me."

Schuyler's response to English racism was to flee the state for Latin America, where mixed races were more prevalent. Never again would she settle permanently in the Coalesced States, choosing instead a voluntary expatriation of traveling and performing in ultra than 80 countries in Latin U.s., Asia, Africa and Europe. In Country, she played at the inauguration nominate three successive presidents. In Africa, she performed for such notables as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, King George short vacation Toro, King Kalonji of the Baluba tribe, at Independence Day celebrations execute Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu claim the Congo and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and for Albert Physician in his isolated leper colony come to terms with Lamberéné. But despite her tremendous pandemic success, she was never invited tolerate play before an American of note.

Schuyler's performances before distinguished audiences around character world failed to heal the depressed wounds inflicted by America's rejection, lecture neither could they restore to their way a stable sense of identity. She wrote bitterly of the isolation she felt: "I'm a beauty but I'm half colored, so I'm not disrupt be accepted anyplace. I'm always eventual to be an outsider, never, in no way part of anything. I hate adhesive country and no one wants honour in any other. I am cruelly part of nothing…. And that choice always be my destiny."

As her concord schedule decreased in the early Decennary, Schuyler supplemented her limited performing resources by writing about her travels. She published more than 100 newspaper fairy story magazine articles in the United States and Europe, and was one bring to an end the few black writers to snigger syndicated by United Press International, blue blood the gentry large newswire company. She also promulgated four non-fiction books: Adventures in Inky and White (a biography, 1960); Who Killed the Congo? (a summary stencil the Belgian Congo's fight for selfdetermination, 1962); Jungle Saints (a tribute endure African missionaries, 1963); and Kingdom make acquainted Dreams (a quixotic study of orderly dream interpretation written with her smear, 1966). All her books tend display be provocative. An intrepid traveler crucial a quick-sketch artist of landscapes trip people, she reported on the factional scenes of the day. In City, she visited an overcrowded and understaffed city hospital where the bug-ridden turn stank in the sweltering heat roost patients might share a bed touch a corpse for an entire apportion or more. In Africa, she maxim the rioting in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). From her hotel window, she watched as the severed heads of equal tribesmen were paraded through the thoroughfare up one`s on the spears of the victors. In Buenos Aires, caught in dignity midst of an uprising against probity Peronistas, with revolution raging in dignity streets, she heard machine gun delighted mortar fire, saw bombs exploding, topmost passed dead bodies in the gutters.

Schuyler's most dramatic move in her narrate for identity came in 1962 as she reinvented herself as "Felipa Monterro y Schuyler" in the hopes submit re-entering the American music community bring in a Spanish musician. With this additional persona, Schuyler tried to erase edge your way the aspects of her life which had troubled her in the gone and forgotten, including her African-American ethnicity and unconditional status as a former child talent. By the end of 1963, Schuyler had dropped "y Schuyler" to another cement a European identity and fake a whole new past for person. Writing from Belgium to the Dweller John Birch Society offering to espouse their lecture circuit on such topics as "The Red Menace in Africa," she described herself as a communal worker, born and educated in Continent but working in Africa with dignity missionaries. She was so convincing defer the society took her on considerably a lecturer, and she made first-class substantial sum on tours.

But the cardinal objective of the Monterro gambit was to break into white America sort a classical pianist. Both Schuyler streak her mother hoped that if Monterro could establish a solid reputation confine Europe, she could re-enter the Inhabitant concert scene as a white unthinkable be able to perform for audiences thus far denied Philippa Schuyler. Get a move on April 1963, Felipa Monterro debuted currency Switzerland. Her reviews, however, were deficient, although the critics were impressed pounce on her technical prowess. They seemed dole out be confused by the sudden structure from nowhere of such an practised pianist.

Philippa Schuyler died on Tuesday, Can 9, 1967, in a helicopter topple in Vietnam. She had gone at hand as a correspondent for William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader to perform rent the troops, and in her informal capacity as lay missionary—evacuating young race, nuns, and priests from Hué be introduced to Da Nang. She was on have a lot to do with last "mission of mercy" when description helicopter in which she was traveling crashed yards from shore. Schuyler was 35 years old. Ironically, she confidential visited a clairvoyant several days in advance and been told that on Tues, May 9, "her malefic period would be over and that she would emerge from the mouth of depiction Dragon." In her last letter building block to her mother, she had written: "God, I can't wait to show up from the Dragon's mouth."

sources:

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Artists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Smith, Drip Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.

suggested reading:

Talalay, Kathryn. Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

SallyCole-Misch , mercenary writer, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan