About
Dr. Samantha Ege is an author, pianist, and music historian. She is best known for her award-winning work on the African American composer Florence Price and critically acclaimed recordings of underrepresented composers.
Research
Research interests
- Historical Musicology
- Archival Methods and Recovery Work
- Practice-Based Research Methods
Current research
On her most recent recording project, Dr. Ege performs as the soloist alongside the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews in the world-premiere recording of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto, which is available from November 21, 2025. In 2026, she will be collaborating with with John Andrews again for a recording of British piano concertos, featuring world premieres and new commissions, with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Another forthcoming project is The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price, co-edited with Alexandra Kori Hill, which will be available from March 2026 and features chapters from C.E. Aaron, Naomi André, Carlene J. Brown, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Rae Linda Brown, Lucy Caplan, Elektra Carter, Minnita Daniel-Cox, Elizabeth Durrant, Samantha Ege, Jane Isabelle Forner, Alexandra Kori Hill, Ellie M. Hisama, Tammy L. Kernodle, Douglas W. Shadle, R. Larry Todd, Louise Toppin, Katharina Uhde, and Joe Williams.
Published by Cambridge University Press, this Companion introduces readers to archives and sources on Price, the style and genre of her music, and her artistic communities and reception. It contextualizes Price's music and life in relation to the sociocultural climate of her time, the Black classical scenes to which she belonged, and the compositional aesthetics that informed her craft. It offers an alternative view of music's capacity to uplift and amplify underrepresented voices.
Publications
Teaching
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Music
Music in the United States
Performance as Research
Biography
Dr. Samantha Ege is an author, pianist, and music historian. She is best known for her award-winning work on the African American composer Florence Price and critically acclaimed recordings of underrepresented composers.
Dr. Ege's first book South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene was hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “a powerful corrective to the ‘Great Man’ theory of history.” She regularly writes about African-descended composers, with bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Statesman. Her BBC Radio 3 documentaries, "Florence Price's Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship" and "Undine Smith Moore: The Dean of Black Women Composers," also reflect the breadth of her broadcasting work.
She made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. She also gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre at the 2021 London Festival of American Music. She has performed across the UK, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. She has also played with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic, Oxford Philharmonic, Oakland Symphony, Arkansas Symphony, New Haven Symphony, and Yale Philharmonia.
On her most recent recording project, Dr. Ege performs as the soloist alongside the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews in the world-premiere recording of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto (out on Resonus Classics this November). She is presently working on another collaboration with John Andrews and the BBC Concert Orchestra for a recording of British piano concertos, featuring world premieres and new commissions.
As a musicologist, Dr. Ege has won several distinctions including the 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award and 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award. She has held research positions at the University of Southampton and was previously the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. In 2024, she was a Rose Library Visiting Research Fellow in the area of African American History and Culture at Emory University, and in 2019 received both a Society for American Music Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Fellowship.
Dr. Ege holds a PhD in Musicology (York) and a BA (hons) in Music (Bristol). She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill as an exchange student.
Ege is pronounced Eh-geh (ɛgɛ)