Helen Eugenia Hagan


Helen Eugenia Hagan was an American pianist, music educator and composer of African descent.

Life

Helen Eugenia Hagan was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the daughter of John A. and Mary Estella Neal Hagan. She studied piano with her mother and then in the public schools of New Haven, Connecticut. Ca. age nine, she began playing organ for the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in New Haven.
She studied at Yale University with Stanley Knight and graduated in 1912 with a bachelor's degree in music, playing her own Concerto in C Minor in May 1912 at Yale. In doing so, she became the first known African American woman to earn a Yale degree. She received the Samuel Simmons Stanford scholarship to study in Paris, with Blanche Selva and Vincent d'Indy, and graduated from Schola Cantorum in 1914. She returned to the United States as World War I began and began a career as a concert pianist, touring from 1915 to 1918. In 1918 she was music director at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College. In early 1919 she left for France to entertain black troops of the AEF, along with Joshua Blanton and Rev. Henry Hugh Proctor, under the auspices of the YMCA.
In 1920 Hagan married John Taylor Williams of Morristown, New Jersey but continued her concert career. She had a music studio in Morristown for at least a decade and was the first African American woman admitted to the Morristown Chamber of Commerce. She taught at the Mendelssohn Conservatory of Music in Chicago and pursued a Masters of Arts degree from Teachers College, Columbia University. In the 1930s she served as dean of music at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. She also continued to work as a choir director and church organist. She died in New York City after an extended illness.
On September 29, 2016, a crowdfunded monument for Hagan's previously unmarked grave was unveiled at New Haven's , and the day was declared "Women Making Music Day" by New Haven mayor Toni Harp.

Works

The only work by Helen Hagan that survives is the . Her other compositions, including piano works and a violin sonata, have been lost.