| Rachel Eubanks | |
| Birth Name: | Rachel Amelia Eubanks |
| Birth Date: | 12 September 1922 |
| Birth Place: | San Jose, California |
| Death Place: | Los Angeles, California |
Rachel Amelia Eubanks (September 12, 1922 – April 8, 2006) was an American composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist.
Rachel Amelia Eubanks was born on September 12, 1922 in San Jose, California, US. Her parents, Joseph Sylvester and Elizabeth Amelia Eubanks, struggled during the Great Depression, still managing to take Rachel and her brothers Jonathan and Joseph to the concerts of numerous musicians: Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. Settling in Oakland, California, Eubanks attended Roosevelt Junior High School and later Oakland High School.
Eubanks learned both clarinet and alto horn in elementary school, later taking piano lessons. She wrote her first composition at 11 years old; after finishing a poem for Mother's Day, Eubanks considered it incomplete and decided to set it to music. Other early pieces include the works Just You and I and Memories of Mother of Mine. Her first serious work came at age 14: the Waters of the Ganges for piano, inspired by the stories of a family friend who went to India as a missionary.
Eubanks married Mac MacDonald, a Baptist minister, in 1950. Her future plans did not align with the traditional responsibilities for the wife of a pastor and the two divorced in 1952. Eubanks studied at Columbia University, the Eastman School of Music, the University of Southern California, Westminster Choir College and in France with Nadia Boulanger through the American Conservatory there. She received a DMA from the Pacific Western University (1980).
Eubanks headed the Albany State University, Georgia, and she later taught theory and composition and was head of the music department at Wilberforce University 1949–50. After settling in Los Angeles (LA), she began offering piano lessons out of her apartment.
Eubanks founded the Eubanks Conservatory of Music and Art in 1951 as its first director. Based in LA, it "began in modest accommodations on 47th and Figueroa Streets", later upsizing for increased enrollment. In its heydays, the conservatory offered Associate and Masters degrees in music performance, composition, theory and history. Initially a nonprofit organization, the Conservatory diminished in enrollment during the 1990s, repeatedly moved locations and has "never returned to its glory days".
Eubanks died on April 8, 2006 in Los Angeles, California from colon cancer.
Eubankss' compositional œuvre includes piano music, songs, orchestral and choral works.
The Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire included her Five Interludes (1984), describing it as "Tense atonal writing, contrapuntal textures, unified by similar intervals in all pieces." The Canadian pianist Helen Walker-Hill recorded the first and last of the Five Interludes for the 1995 Kaleidoscope: Music by African-American Women album.
Her other works include the Symphonic Requiem for orchestra and four solo voices (1980) as well as a cantata, written for choir and orchestra.