Discipline: Music Composition

Eunice Kettering

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Albuquerque, NM
MacDowell Fellowships: 1958

Eunice Kettering (4/4/1906-3/9/2000) was an American composer and professor. She was born in Savannah, Ohio and began composing music at age six. She received a B.M. in 1929 from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a master’s of sacred music from the School of Sacred Music of the Union Theological Seminary in 1933. Kettering was a professor at Madison University in Virginia and Ashland University in Ohio. She later moved to New Mexico to focus on composing. Her compositions were performed in colleges, churches, universities, and on radio stations and 20,000 copies of her work were published.

Kettering was part of the National Association of American Composers and Conductors, Pi Kappa Lambda, and the National Federation of Music Clubs, who awarded her first place for a choral-orchestral composition in 1943 and a merit award for outstanding service to other composers in 1970. She received first place in multiple categories by the National League of American Pen Women and the Annual Institute for Education by Radio and Television. The Ashland, OH Junior Music Club was renamed the Eunice Kettering Music Club in 1958. She was the first woman in the United States to become a Fellow in the American Guild of Organists.

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Eunice Kettering worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.

In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…

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