This summer, I worked under Professor Glenda Goodman, studying the Marian Anderson Manuscripts collection and the Marian Anderson Correspondence collection. These collections are un-digitized and contain music compositions and personal letters sent to Marian Anderson by her adoring fans. I chose to focus my research on the women composers, especially the Black women composers.

I had two main goals for this research.

The first goal was to collect and organize data about the manuscripts and the women who created them. I wanted to present this data in a way that might be useful for future researchers, since the manuscript collection is not digitized.

The second goal was to perform further research on the Black women composers who wrote and sent music to Marian Anderson.

In the end, I was able to reach both of my goals.

I made three spreadsheets: in the first, I recorded information like genre, language, and date of publication about each of the manuscripts written by women; in the second, I recorded information about the contents of those women’s correspondence with Marian Anderson, when applicable; and in the third, I recorded personal information about each of the women such as birth and death dates and locations, race, and occupation, using external sources like ancestry.com and ProQuest.

I also wrote brief profiles of each of the 22 Black woman composers using the data from the spreadsheets along with external academic research.

One thing that stuck out to me was the diversity of the group of women who admired Marian Anderson, in terms of race, age, and socio-economic situation. There is so much more research to be done on these women, and I hope that the work I did this summer will be a starting point for other researchers. It is important to continue to elevate the voices of composers and musicians who—owing to restrictions like gender, class, and race—did not get the attention they deserved during their lifetime.