Nora Holt

She was born Lena or Lora Douglas in Kansas City, Kansas, between 1883 and 1885 (the exact year of her birth is contested) to Calvin Douglas, an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, and Gracie Brown Douglas. Her mother encouraged her to start piano lessons at the age of four, giving her an early affinity for music and leading to her playing organ for several years in St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Kansas City. Her father Calvin was a presiding elder with the AME Church and was on the board of trustees for Western University. He wrote the words for the school song, "O Western U." for the dedication of Grant Hall in 1907. Nora Holt wrote the music for this song but destroyed the score in a dispute for authorship between her and her music professor who only helped with some of the harmonies. Holt graduated valedictorian from Western University at Quindaro, Kansas, in 1917 with a bachelor's degree in music. In 1918, she earned her master's degree in music at Chicago Musical College, the first African American to earn a master's degree in music composition in the United States. In 1931, she studied with Nadia Boulanger at The American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. In the late 1930s, Holt also studied music education at the University of Southern California. == Career ==

From 1917 to 1923, Holt contributed music criticism to the Chicago Defender, one of the most famous and influential Black newspapers in America. From 1921 to 1922, Holt published and edited a monthly magazine for Black musicians entitled Music and Poetry. It was in this magazine where Holt published two of her own compositions, Negro Dance, for piano and an art song titled The Sand-Man. Regarding the latter, although Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote a poem of the same title, there is almost no overlap between the text of Dunbar's poem and that of Holt's piece; the text may be Holt's original work, and its source is currently unknown. Holt's journal also contained contributions from artists and writers such as Clarence Cameron White, Kemper Harreld, Helen Hagan, and Maud Cuney Hare, among many others. Between 1923 and 1943, Holt withdrew from music criticism and spent many of these years traveling in Europe and Asia. By 1926, she had composed more than 200 works for orchestral music and chamber songs. Sadly, all of her compositions were stolen during her time abroad and only her two previously published works survived. == Personal life ==

Douglas married five times. At the age of 15, she married a musician called Sky James, then two years later married politician Philip Scroggins, followed not long afterwards by a marriage to a barber named Bruce Jones. In 1916, she married her fourth husband, hotel owner George Holt, taking his name and changing her first name to "Nora". In the early 1920s, she moved to Harlem, where she became an important part of the Harlem Renaissance. She became good friends many visionaries, activists, and novelists of the time, including Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. == Death ==

Nora Holt died at the age of 89 on January 25, 1974, in a Los Angeles nursing home. ==References==