We’ve been remiss in celebrating Black History Month, but now we are ready to CELEBRATE!!!
One of our big projects of 2025 was working with the Estate of Helen Hagan so that we could publish her 1912 Concerto in C minor! And this year we have the joyful project of telling the orchestral world that now this thrilling work is available for performance!! (We’ve reported on the re-discovery of Helen Hagan (1891-1964) previously)
Hagan’s Concerto, which she wrote while a student at the Yale School of Music, survives only in a two-piano version. Yale asked composer Soomin Kim to reconstruct and orchestrate the work, and now we are distributing that version. It has been performed by both the Yale Philharmonia and the New Haven Symphony (with performers Dr. Samantha Ege and Michelle Cann), and is programmed by the Miami University Symphony Orchestra for May 7, 2026 (although it is not yet on their calendar). We look forward to other pianists and orchestras now planning to bring this powerful work with their audiences.
As Ege explained in the Yale School of Music News in 2022,
Hagan’s life and music suggest a much longer history of Black female symphonic composers—even if we don’t necessarily know their names. But Hagan evidences the depths of this hidden history. So, as a scholar, I always try to write with an awareness that there are many other Prices and Hagans out there, and we can frame historical Black women’s classical music accomplishments in a way that acknowledges the wider possibilities. …. Black classical composers of this time are looking to find harmony in the past and articulate an uplifting vision for the future. Many of Hagan’s contemporaries did that through bridging Black folk melodies with classical conventions. While Hagan’s Piano Concerto doesn’t engage folk songs and Negro Spirituals, her Romantic voice—filled with rich harmonies and hopeful overtones—very much belongs to a tradition that encompasses African descended composers from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Robert Nathaniel Dett to Florence Price and Nora Holt. …
As a classical composer, Hagan is not an outlier to the Black concert tradition nor is she an outlier to the wider landscape of Black artistry at this time. … Hagan—as the first Black female music graduate at Yale—is a trailblazing figure in that landscape.
And orchestrator/composer Soomin Kim recalls:
Helen Hagan, Piano Concerto source in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University Library
I received a scanned copy of Hagan’s manuscript, which was in a two-piano version. Most of the notes were there, and even some scribbles about what instruments she was going to use to orchestrate a certain passage. However, it was missing a lot of dynamics and detailed tempo markings. It also didn’t specify the instrumentation of the orchestra. … In orchestrating it, I had to keep in mind that this was a short score, and not a piece written for two pianos, because writing for the orchestra and writing for the piano are completely different….. It was as if I had to take the essence of the music and reimagine it in the context of the orchestra.
You can purchase a copy of this orchestrated score of the Piano Concerto here on our Shop Page, and here Ege’s recording of the two-piano version of the Concerto (with John Paul Ekin).
Helen Eugenia Hagan