“No Now, No Then, No Here, No There”: The Inner World of Undine Smith Moore

Abstract

This essay explores the inner world of Undine Smith Moore, a Virginia-born practitioner and educator, reverently known as the “Dean of Black Women Composers.” Herein, I ask: what might it mean to learn from the Dean not only who she was and what she did, but how she remembered and reimagined? Drawing on Moore’s speech “On Becoming a Virginia Composer” (1984), I am attentive to what she called her “inner world.” Existing as a subconscious and spatiotemporally fluid realm in which liberatory dreams and Afrodiasporic nightmares could converge, Moore’s inner world reflected what Michelle M. Wright calls “Epiphenomenal time, or the ‘now’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted.” Accordingly, I look and listen for Moore’s ideas about the past, present, and future not only in her own words and music but also in a range of artistries and texts, including those of Toni Morrison, Kehinde Wiley, Wright, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. With the musicological interventions of Tammy L. Kernodle, Helen Walker-Hill, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., and others undergirding this work (and an Afrodiasporic interdisciplinarity guiding its path), this essay situates Moore’s inner world and compositional practice in the wider art and science of Black women’s knowledge production.