Dr. Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020-22). She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York and a BA with honors in music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student. She taught music internationally for almost a decade after graduating from Bristol.
Dr. Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr Ege’s publications and performances shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2021 she received the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award for her Black Renaissance Woman recording project. In 2019 she received both the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship for her work on women’s contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Dr. Ege’s first book is called South Side Impresarios: Race Women in the Realm of Music (University of Illinois Press). She has been contracted as co-author alongside Douglas Shadle of a Price biography for the Master Musicians Series (Oxford University Press) and co-editor alongside A. Kori Hill of The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price (Cambridge University Press).
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 U.K. 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 additionally presented her research and repertoire at a number of other institutions and venues in the U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Dr. Ege released her debut album in 2018 called Four Women: Music for Solo Piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland & Bonds (Wave Theory Records). She released her critically acclaimed second album in March 2021 called Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.). Her third and fourth albums (both with Lorelt) came out in 2022: Black Renaissance Woman: Piano Music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King & Helen Hagan and Homage: Chamber Music from the African Continent and Diaspora with the Castle of our Skins string quartet.