About
Dr. Samantha Ege, FRCM 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. Her next recording project takes place between 2026-7 is an exploration of heritage and belonging, featuring world premieres of Ethel Bilsland's Piano Concerto and Camila Cortina Bello's Concerto "Coleridge" for Piano and Orchestra. The program flows in dialogue with works by Dame Judith Weir, Shirley J. Thompson OBE, and William Alwyn. Dr. Ege will record with the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor John Andrews.
The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price (Cambridge University Press, 2026), edited by Samantha Ege and Alexandra Kori Hill 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.
An historic addition to the advanced keyboard repertoire, Dr. Ege's edition of Florence B. Price's Four Fantasies for Piano (Oxford University Press, 2026) honours the composer's development of the Fantasie Nègre genre into a collective body of works. This critical edition foregrounds Price's original, unrevised manuscripts, most notably in the case of No. 4, and presents Ege's meticulous reconstruction of the incomplete, presumed lost, third Fantasie. It also serves as a performing edition, drawing on Ege's significant performance history with this work to include fingerings, redistributions of notes between hands, and additional dynamic and tempo markings, as well as detailed performance notes. This is a spectacular set of virtuosic pieces that showcases Price's ability to blend African American folk idioms and traditional forms with her own unique musical language.
Piano Music of the Black Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2026) is a groundbreaking anthology that introduces a canon of piano works from the Black Renaissance school of the early twentieth century. The music of Harry T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, R. Nathaniel Dett, Nora Douglas Holt, Florence B. Price, Zenobia Powell Perry, Margaret Bonds, and Betty Jackson King affirms a rich, Afrodiasporic concert tradition, in which African, Caribbean, and African American folk songs and dances are absorbed into a distinct classical voice. This volume offers clearly presented performing editions, with fingering and pedalling, of a representative selection of piano music from this period, ranging from intermediate to advanced levels. Notes by Dr Samantha Ege provide historical background and interpretative insights for this previously overlooked area of piano literature.
Research projects
Active projects
Publications
Teaching
Music in Context II (survey module, 1750 to present)
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Music
Music in the United States
Performance as Research
Biography
Dr. Samantha Ege FRCM is a music historian, author, and pianist. 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." South Side Impresarios received an honorary mention from the 2026 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Book Award. Her latest publications include The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price, an anthology titled Piano Music of the Black Renaissance, and a critical edition of Florence Price's Fantasie Nègre: Four Fantasies for Piano - the latter of which Yannick Nézet-Séguin praised as "a valuable addition to the piano repertoire."
She regularly writes about African-descended composers, with bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Prospect Magazine. Her research and recordings have been featured on NPR and in The Washington Post, The Telegraph, and The Economist. 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.
As a concert pianist, she made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (iNews) and in 2021 also made the world premiere recording of Florence B. Price's complete Fantasie Nègre, hailed by the New York Times as "Triumphs indeed." She has performed across the UK, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, and played with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic, Oxford Philharmonic, Oakland Symphony, Arkansas Symphony, and New Haven Symphony.
On her latest album, Dr. Ege was the soloist alongside the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews in the world-premiere recording of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto. Her performance was highly commended across Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Limelight, and more. Her next album, with John Andrews and the BBC Concert Orchestra, features new works by Shirley J. Thompson and Camila Cortina Bello alongside music by Ethel Bilsland that has not been heard in over a century.
Dr. Ege was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2025 and in 2026 became a Voting Member of the Recording Academy (GRAMMYS). For her academic work, she has received further distinctions including the 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award and 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award. She is a Lecturer at the University of Southampton and has held research positions at Southampton and as 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. Her academic writing appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, and Women and Music.
Dr. Ege holds a PhD in Music (University York) and a first-class BA (honours) in Music (University of Bristol). She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student.
Ege is pronounced Eh-geh (ɛgɛ)
Prizes
- Irving Lowens Article Award of the Society for American Music (2023)