Samantha Ege

Pianist Samantha Ege has specialized in the music of African American female composers. She is also a noted musicologist who has written extensively about music by Black women in Chicago between the world wars. Ege has released several albums devoted to that repertory. In 2025, she issued the album Maestra: Julia Perry & Doreen Carwithen, containing African American and British music.Ege was born in Guildford in Surrey, England, and grew up in the suburban London community of Purley. She is of Jamaican and Nigerian heritage. Ege loved music as a child, playing the piano along with songs on the radio or television, and was encouraged by her parents, but it was mostly the works of European-born male composers that she studied at first. She did play the piano rags of Scott Joplin, although they were discouraged by her teachers. Ege attended the University of Bristol, earning a B.A. with honors. She spent a year abroad at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and it was there that she began to encounter the works of female composers: at first, the French sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger, and then the African American Chicagoans Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds, of whose existence she had hardly been aware. At Bristol, she was primarily interested in musicology, but she continued to play the piano, and she earned a living as a teacher for ten years in various countries before returning to her studies at the University of York. There, Ege earned a PhD in musicology, but, at the same time, she told the Cross-Eyed Pianist (June 27, 2019), "I realised the power in forging a career that bridges both" scholarship and performance. In 2018, Ege released her debut album, Four Women: Music for solo piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland & Bonds. It contained the world premiere of composer Ethel Bilsland's The Birthday Party.Ege has often performed as a lecture-recitalist, focusing on the work of Price and other women composers. In 2018, at the Chicago Symphony Center, she held the event "A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance," and she has presented a combination of music and research at other institutions and venues in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong, among others. In 2020, she was named the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at the University of Oxford's Lincoln College. Ege made her debut at the Barbican in London in 2021 with a recital that included the British premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. That year, she released the album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, and in 2022, she issued the recital album Black Renaissance Woman, featuring music by Price, Bonds, Nora Holt, Helen Hagan, and Betty Jackson King. The album received the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. Ege returned in 2023 with the group Castle of Our Skins on the album Homage: Chamber Music from the African Continent & Diaspora. In 2025, she released the album Maestra: Julia Perry & Doreen Carwithen; that recording, like her others of the 2020s, appeared on the Lorelt label.
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