Discipline: Music Composition

Gena Branscombe

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1945, 1956
Gena Branscombe (1881–1977) was a Canadian pianist, composer, music educator, and choir conductor who lived and worked in the U.S. Branscombe entered the Chicago Musical College in 1897 to study piano with Rudolph Ganz and composition with Felix Borowski. At the school she won gold medals for her compositions in 1901 and 1902. Between 1903 and 1907, she taught piano in Chicago, leaving to join the faculty as head of the piano department at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. Her compositional interests led her to leave Whitman in 1909 to study with Engelbert Humperdinck in Berlin. She returned to Ontario in 1910, where she married John Ferguson Tenney. The couple moved to New York where, in addition to starting a family, Branscombe studied choral conducting with Chalmers Clifton and Albert Stoessel, conductor of the Oratorio Society of New York. She became active in working for the equality of women in the field of music and was elected president of the Society of American Women Composers in 1928. That year she received the annual prize given by the League of American Pen Women for her large-scale choral drama Pilgrims of Destiny. Branscombe wrote both the text and music for that work about the voyage of the Mayflower to the New World. In 1932, she received an honorary M.A. from Whitman College. In 1933, she founded the Branscombe Choral, formerly the American Women's Association Choral, and conducted the 60-member choir for 21 years. She wrote new works for the group and commissioned works by other women composers. The Choral gave radio broadcasts, performed for commuters in Penn Station and Grand Central Station, and presented annual concerts at Town Hall. Branscombe's compositional output includes some 150 art songs, piano and chamber music, a few orchestral works, and a large body of choral pieces. Her most important orchestral work is “Quebec Suite” from her unfinished opera The Bells of Circumstance. In addition to her many choral compositions for women's voices, she wrote Coventry's Choir (1962), which was widely performed in Great Britain. Her hymn, “Arms that Have Sheltered Us,” was adopted in 1960 by the Royal Canadian Navy. At age 92, Branscombe composed Introit, Prayer, Response, and Amen, commissioned by Riverside Church in New York.

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Gena Branscombe 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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