Maud Cuney Hare

Maud Cuney Hare (née Cuney, February 16, 1874 – February 13 1936) was an American pianist, musicologist, writer, and African-American activist in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. She was born in Galveston, Texas, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney, who led the Texas Republican Party during and after the Reconstruction Era, and his wife Adelina (née Dowdie), a schoolteacher. In 1913, Cuney Hare published a biography of her father.

Essentially part of the second generation after emancipation, Cuney Hare studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and became an accomplished pianist. She lived in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston, most of her adult life. A musicologist, she collected music from across the South and Caribbean in her study of folklore, and was the first to study Creole music. In 1929 she wrote the play Antar of Araby about Antar Bin Shaddad. Her final work, Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936), documents the development of African-American music. He established a business of stevedore workers, employing about 500 men on the docks and organizing a union. and music theory with Martin Roeder.

Return to Boston After the divorce, Maud returned to Boston. She married William Parker Hare on August 10, 1904, In 1906, Maud gained access to her daughter during the summer months, but Vera died in 1908. It was a predecessor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909.

Allied Arts Center founder Cuney Hare founded the Allied Arts Center in Boston, to encourage education and performance in the arts. In addition to providing funding and serving as a manager, she performed and lectured there.

Cuney Hare wrote numerous articles about black music and arts. Throughout her life, She was a close friend and confidante of noted author and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, once writing to him in frustration over a lecture by Egyptologist George Reisner that she had attended. Cuney Hare was frustrated by Reisner's incorrect racializing claim about the ancient people. She edited a column on music and the arts for The Crisis, the magazine that Du Bois edited for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also contributed articles on these topics to the Christian Science Monitor, Musical Quarterly, Musical Observer, and Musical America. Northwestern University has a playbill for it. Cuney Hare never saw the published book. Suffering from cancer, which prevented her from playing the piano, but not from proof-reading her manuscript, she died before it was published.

Works

Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People (1913), a biography of her father. Six Creole folk-songs : with original Creole and translated English text (1921) "Portuguese Folk-Songs, from Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts", The Musical Quarterly [0027-4631], 1928, vol:14 iss:1, pp. 35–53 Antar of Araby (1929), a play revolving around the life of the Arab/Abyssinian poet whose "valor" outshines his status as a slave a history of African-American music traditions from Africa to the American Jazz Age .