Lucile Crews Explained

Lucile Crews (August 23, 1888 — November 3, 1972) was an American composer.

Biography

Lucile Crews was born on August 23, 1888, in Pueblo, Colorado.

She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music before going to Europe, where she worked with Nadia Boulanger and Hugo Kaun.^{[1] [2]}

On September 30, 1915, she married organist Charles H. Marsh in Pueblo.^[3]

Lucile Crews received a Bachelor of Music from the University of Redlands in 1920.

In April 1926, she was the first woman ever to receive a Pulitzer Scholarship in Music for her 1926 orchestral tone poem To an Unknown Soldier.^[4] (This was more than a half century before Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was the first woman ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1983, forty years after that prize was first awarded in 1943.) Among Crews's other compositions are a miniature opera, Ariadne and Dionysus (1935), a one-act opera, Eight Hundred Rubles (1926),^[5] a Suite for strings and woodwinds, awarded at the Festival of Allied Arts in Los Angeles,^[6] a sonata for viola and piano, and pieces for piano and voice.

Lucile Crews died on November 3, 1972, in San Diego, California.

Works

• The Call of Joan of Arc, opera, adapted from Joan of Arc by Percy MacKaye, 1923
• Eight Hundred Rubies, opera, libretto by John Neidhardt, 1926
• Ariadne and Dionysius, one-act opera, NBC Music Guild, 1935
• The Concert, 1959^[7]

References

1. Book: McVicker, Mary Frech . Women composers of classical music: 369 biographies from 1550 into the 20th Century . 2011 . McFarland . 978-0-7864-4397-0 . Jefferson, NC.
2. Book: The Woman's Journal . 1926 . Woman citizen corporation . en.
3. Book: Sunset . 1926 . Passenger Department, Southern Pacific Company . en.
4. https://www.newspapers.com/image/50531642/ "Woman Given $1500 Award: Pulitzer Scholarship Goes to Mrs. Charles Marsh of Redlands,"
5. Book: McVicker, Mary Frech . Women opera composers: biographies from the 1500s to the 21st century . 2016 . McFarland & c . 978-0-7864-9513-9 . Jefferson, N.C.
6. Book: California Southland . 1925 . California Southland . en.
7. Book: McVicker, Mary Frech . Women composers of classical music: 369 biographies from 1550 into the 20th Century . 2011 . McFarland . 978-0-7864-4397-0 . Jefferson, NC.