A00499 - Philippa Schuyler, Child Prodigy Pianist

Philippa Duke Schuyler (/ˈskaɪlər/; August 2, 1931 – May 9, 1967) was a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of her talent, mixed-raceparentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up.

Schuyler was the daughter of George S. Schuyler, a prominent black essayist and journalist Josephine Cogdell, a white Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty, from a former slave-owning family. Her parents believed that intermarriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed-race marriage could help to solve many of the United States's social problems.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Life
  • 1.1 Childhood
  • 1.2 Music
  • 1.3 Later life and journalism
  • 1.4 Death
• 2 Legacy
• 3 Bibliography
• 4 See also
• 5 References
  • 5.1 Sources
• 6 External links

Life[edit]

Childhood[edit]

Cogdell further believed that genius could best be developed by a diet consisting exclusively of raw foods. As a result, Philippa grew up in her New York City apartment eating a diet predominantly comprising raw carrots, peas and yams and raw steak. She was given a daily ration of cod liver oil and lemon slices in place of sweets. "When we travel," Cogdell said, "Philippa and I amaze waiters. You have to argue with most waiters before they will bring you raw meat. I guess it is rather unusual to see a little girl eating a raw steak."

Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Schuyler was reportedly able to read and write at the age of two and a half, and composed music from the age of five. At nine, she became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by Joseph Mitchell, correspondent for The New Yorker, who heard several of her early compositions and noted that she addressed both her parents by their first names.

Music[edit]

Schuyler began giving piano recitals and radio broadcasts while still a child and attracted significant press coverage. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was one of her admirers and visited her at her home on more than one occasion. By the time she reached adolescence, Schuyler was touring constantly, both in the US and overseas.

Her talent as a pianist was widely acknowledged, although many critics believed that her forte lay in playing vigorous pieces and criticised her style when tackling more nuanced works. Acclaim for her performances led to her becoming a role model for many children in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, but Schuyler's own childhood was blighted when, during her teenage years, her parents showed her the scrapbooks they had compiled recording her life and career. The books contained numerous newspaper clippings in which both George and Josephine Schuyler commented on their beliefs and ambitions for their daughter. Realisation that she had been conceived and raised, in a sense, as an experiment, robbed the pianist of many of the illusions that had made her earlier youth a happy one.

Later life and journalism[edit]

In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered, particularly when performing in the United States, and much of her musical career was spent playing overseas. In her thirties she abandoned the piano to follow her father into journalism.

Schuyler's personal life was frequently unhappy. She rejected many of her parents' values, increasingly becoming a vocal feminist, and made many attempts to pass herself off as a woman of Iberian (Spanish) descent named Filipa Monterro. Although she engaged in a number of affairs, and on one occasion endured a dangerous late-term abortion after a relationship with a Ghanaian diplomat, she never married.

Philippa Schuyler and her father, George Schuyler, were members of the John Birch Society.^[1]

Death[edit]

In 1967 Schuyler traveled to Vietnam as a war correspondent. During a helicopter mission near Da Nang to evacuate a number of Vietnamese orphans, the helicopter crashed into the sea. While she initially survived the crash, her inability to swim caused her to drown. A court of enquiry found that the pilot had deliberately cut his motor and descended in an uncontrolled glide – possibly in an attempt to give his civilian passengers an insight into the dangers of flying in a combat zone – eventually losing control of the aircraft.

Her mother was profoundly affected by her daughter's death and committed suicide on its second anniversary.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy[edit]

Film rights to Schuyler's biography have been sold and it was once reported that she was to become the subject of a movie starring Alicia Keys.^[2]

Philippa Schuyler Middle School for the Gifted and Talented in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York is dedicated to preserving the memory of the child prodigy by offering an arts-focused education to New York City children.

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So Young, So Gifted, So Sad By Carolyn See  Nov. 24, 1995  This one's a heartbreaker. This one will make you wring your hands about America, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be black. In case you ever harbored any utopian ideals about how -- with hard work and good intentions -- we might make this a better country, this book will certainly disabuse you of any daydreams in that regard. Also, if you ever had any mushy, personal thoughts about fame -- how, if you ever managed to get your picture in Time magazine, you could transcend your own personal history and achieve a secular heaven of success -- this book will disabuse you of that, too. Philippa Duke Schuyler was born in 1931 to a black journalist father and a wealthy Southern white mother who sold themselves on the idea that only by miscegenation could the race question in America be solved. (Or, more accurately, Josephine, the mom, wrote that down in her diary. George Schuyler may have had another whole agenda.) Josephine had gone from man to man and wanted to make a statement, put some kind of meaning in her life. She married that black man, scandalized her folks, fed her daughter on raw liver and brains and began keeping scrapbooks on her "hybrid experiment." The raw liver must have worked because in no time Philippa was walking, talking, reading, writing. Her IQ tested out at 180, and by age 4 she was playing Mozart. Her dad was already fooling around with the ladies, but her mother had found her life's work, the creation of a musical genius. Here, Philippa's story takes a terrible turn. Her mother whipped her regularly. She never had any friends because she hardly ever got to go to school. When she did go, she was years ahead of the other kids, and she was the only person "of color" for miles around. Thanks to her journalist father, she had her picture in the magazines as a talented "Negro" prodigy, but in day-to-day life it was only Philippa and her mother, locked in an isolated, manipulative struggle. Even her piano teachers, who might have offered her various windows onto the world, were dismissed by her mother as soon as there was any emotional attachment between them and Philippa. The prodigy and her mother went on tour. The reviews were almost always good. But both Philippa and her mother were incredibly slow learners about the nature of the outside world: As a woman, Philippa would have a terribly hard time making it as a concert pianist; as a mulatto she would find it almost impossible. She would do well enough as a child prodigy, but there would come a time when she would hit the wall. Had her mother turned out a genius or a freak of nature? Kathryn Talalay, the author of this sad and thoughtful biography, doesn't jump to conclusions; she just lets the story play out. When Philippa is presented, in her early teens, with the scrapbooks that chronicle her life, she's horrified; she understands that from her parents' point of view, she's been a genetic experiment. She can't even take credit for her own "genius" since her mother has been so relentlessly pulling the strings in her life. But she has no recourse; her whole existence has been playing the piano, dolling up in the spotlight and then either working for, with, or against her mother. There is no way out. After Philippa is grown, her touring takes her through South America, Europe, Africa. She's well received, but her life is at once adventurous and intensely narrow. She rarely has the time to have fun or even see where she's touring. In Africa, she's tormented by all that it means to be black. She sees women toiling, disregarded, disrespected. Indeed, as time goes by, she decides she really isn't black. "I am not a Negro!" she writes her mother, and using mental sleight-of-hand, she decides that her father came from Madagascar, and that she's really "Malay-American-Indian and European." So desperate was she not to be "colored" that she took out a passport in another name, Felipa Monterro y Schuyler, suggesting that she had an Iberian heritage. Her politics had by this time become so strange that she lectured regularly to the John Birch Society. She had strings of suitors who treated her badly, and the one man who loved her she couldn't abide. She was, in a phrase, totally screwed up. She was unable to resolve the elements of black and white in her own life, unable to shake off her demon mother, unable to love or be loved. She died in 1967 in a helicopter accident in Vietnam, where she had gone in her new career as a reporter. And yet, for hundreds, thousands of black kids in the '40s and '50s, she was a role model, a reason to take piano lessons. This is a bleak, extraordinarily weird American life. Kathryn Talalay has done a gorgeous job with this unique material. ________________________________________________________________________ 1931-1967 Classical pianist, writer One of the most unusual and perhaps most tragic figures in American cultural history, Philippa Schuyler gained national acclaim as a child prodigy on the piano. Her picture graced the covers of weekly news magazines, and she was hailed as a young American Mozart. Schuyler's life during adulthood, however, was a difficult one. She struggled with racial discrimination and with issues related to her mixed-race background, traveling the world in an attempt to find not only musical success but also an identity and a place in the world. She turned to writing in the early 1960s, visiting war zones as a newspaper correspondent, and she was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1967. After her death she was mostly forgotten for several decades, but her life story was told in a 1995 biography, and in 2004 American R&B vocalist Alicia Keys, a classically trained pianist of mixed-race background herself, announced plans to star in a film about Schuyler's life. Philippa Duke Schuyler was born on August 2, 1931, in New York and brought up in Harlem at the height of the area's cultural flowering. The complexities of her life began with her background, for she had two singular parents. Her father George Schuyler was a journalist who wrote for one of the leading black newspapers of the day, the Pittsburgh Courier, and he was well acquainted with numerous writers in both black and white journalistic circles. He was not a civil rights crusader like many of his Harlem contemporaries, but rather a conservative satirist who rejected the idea of a distinctive black culture and later in life joined the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. Philippa Schuyler's mother, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, was a white Southern belle from a Texas ranch who had married George Schuyler after coming to New York to escape a wealthy family of unreconstructed racists. They all refused to attend concerts Philippa Schuyler gave in Texas at the height of her fame. Schuyler's parents were in the grip of several novel theories and fads, some of which they devised themselves. They fed Philippa raw vegetables, brains, and liver, believing that cooking leached vital nutrients out of food. And, in contrast to the now-discredited but at the time widely held belief in eugenics, which formed the basis for Nazi ideas of racial purity, they claimed that racial mixing could produce a superior "hybrid" sort of human. That notion had strong effects on Philippa Schuyler's life, for the Schuylers planned to make their daughter into Exhibit A for the gains that could be realized from black-white intermarriage. Tests Revealed Genius-Level IQ And, indeed, the plan seemed to work. Schuyler walked before she was a year old, was said to be reading the Rubaiyat poems of Omar Khayyam at two and a half, and playing the piano and writing stories at three. When she was five, Schuyler underwent an IQ test at Columbia University; it yielded the genius-level figure of 185. She made rapid progress on the piano, and due to Mr. Schuyler's connections it wasn't long before stories about Philippa began to appear in New York newspapers. Schuyler's mother, described by the New York Times as "the stage mother from hell, blending a frustrated artist's ambition with an activist's self-righteousness," started to enter her in musical competitions. Schuyler did spectacularly well and was a regular concert attraction by the time she was eight. Just short of her ninth birthday, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named a day after her at the New York World's Fair. But her childhood was an isolated one; she was taught mostly by private tutors and had no friends her own age. Her mother, who fired her piano teachers whenever she began to get close to one emotionally, beat her regularly. For a period of time during World War II, Schuyler was a national child star. She wrote a symphony at age 13, and leading composer and critic Virgil Thomson pronounced it the equal of works that Mozart had written at that age after the New York Philharmonic performed it in 1945. A concert Schuyler performed with the Philharmonic soon after that was attended by a crowd of 12,000, and profiles of the attractive teen appeared in Time, Look, and The New Yorker. Schuyler was promoted by the black press in general, not just in her father's Pittsburgh Courier, as a role model, and she certainly inspired a generation of black parents to sign their kids up for piano lessons. But there were pitfalls ahead for the talented youngster. When she was 13, she discovered a scrapbook her mother had kept of her accomplishments, and more and more she began to feel like an exotic flower on display. On tour, especially in the South, she began to experience racial prejudice, something of which she had been mostly unaware during her sheltered upbringing. Bookings began to dry up, except in black-organized concert series. Observers have offered various explanations as to why. Schuyler herself and many others pointed to discrimination; the world of classical music has never been a nurturing one for African-American performers, and in the 1940s very few blacks indeed had access to major concert stages. Some felt that Schuyler's playing, although technically flawless, suffered from an emotionless quality brought on by the strictures of her demanding life. And Schuyler faced a problem she had in common with other teenage sensations—the tendency of the spotlight to seek out the next young phenomenon. Became World Traveler Schuyler and her mother reacted by once again calling in George Schuyler's connections; he had friends in Latin American countries, and Schuyler began to give concerts there. In 1952 she visited Europe for the first time. Schuyler enjoyed travel, and, like other black performers, found a measure of unprejudiced acceptance among European audiences. Over the next 15 years she would appear in 80 countries and would master four new languages, becoming proficient enough in French, Portuguese, and Italian that she could write for periodicals published in those languages. She traveled to Africa as well as Europe, performing for independence leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Haile Selassie in Ethiopia—but also passing for white in apartheid-era South Africa. Schuyler began to resist the pressure that still came from her parents, but she remained close to them, writing to her mother almost daily and becoming their chief means of financial support. "Remember, my bitterness requires mobility and relocation," she wrote to her mother shortly before her death in a letter quoted in Notable Black American Women. Her income came not only from music but also from lectures she gave to groups such as the virulently anti-internationalist John Birch Society, for Schuyler had come to share her father's conservative politics. Despite her performances in newly independent African capitals, she came to adopt a positive outlook on European colonialism. A string of romantic relationship all ended badly, and by the early 1960s Schuyler was threatened with financial problems. At a Glance … Born on August 2, 1931, in New York; daughter of George Schuyler an African-American journalist and satirical novelist and Josephine Cogdell Schuyler the daughter of a white Texas ranching family; died in a helicopter crash on May 9, 1967, in Da Nang Bay, Vietnam. Education: Taught mostly by private tutors. Religion: Roman Catholic. Career: Classical pianist, child prodigy, 1950-60(?);United Press International and Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader, correspondent, 1960(?)-67. Awards: Winner, New York Philharmonic Notebook Contest; received 27 music awards, including two from Wayne State University (Detroit) and one from Detroit Symphony Orchestra for composition; three decorations from foreign governments. Confused and fearful about the future, Schuyler took steps in two new directions. First, since her ethnic identity seemed uncertain to those who had never encountered her, she began in 1962 to bill herself as Felipa Monterro or Felipa Monterro y Schuyler. She even obtained a new passport in that name. Her motivation seems to have been split between a desire to have audiences judge her without knowing of her African-American background, and a broader renunciation of her black identity. The ruse convinced audiences for a time, but the reviews of her concerts were mixed, and she soon abandoned the effort. Filed Dispatches Amid Unrest Second, Schuyler began to write. Traveling the globe, she filed stories from political hot spots for United Press International and later for the ultraconservative Manchester Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire. Schuyler found herself in the middle of street violence in the Congo and in Argentina; the demise she met in Vietnam could easily have come earlier. She wrote several books and magazine articles as well, and at her death she left several unpublished novels in various stages of completion. One of them evolved into an autobiography, Adventures in Black and White, which was published in 1960. Schuyler also wrote two books about Africa, one of them, Who Killed the Congo?, dealing with the legacy of colonialism and the other, Jungle Saints, praising the efforts of Catholic missionaries on the continent. During the last part of her life, she became a devout Catholic herself. In Rome she met two popes. She traveled to Vietnam to do lay missionary work, supporting U.S. military action there and writing a posthumously published book about American soldiers, Good Men Die. She founded an organization devoted to the aid of children fathered by U.S. servicemen, and on several occasions she assisted Catholic organizations in evacuating children and convent residents from areas of what was then the nation of South Vietnam as pro-North Vietnamese guerrillas advanced. It was on one of those evacuation missions, on May 9, 1967, that Schuyler's helicopter crashed into Da Nang Bay. She drowned, for she was unable to swim. Shortly before her death, she had written a letter that seemed to suggest a political change of heart, expressing sympathy with black activist leader Stokely Carmichael. Schuyler's funeral was held at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, and in death she was once again in the headlines. Two years after her death, Schuyler's mother hanged herself in her Harlem apartment. A New York City school was named after Schuyler, but her name dropped into temporary obscurity. She became better known with the publication in 1995 ofComposition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler, a biography by Kathryn Talalay. In 2004, star vocalist Alicia Keys was signed to portray Schuyler in a film co-produced by actress Halle Berry. "This story is so much about finding your place in the world," Keys told Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper. "Where do we really fit in, in a world so full of boxes and categories?" Selected writings Adventures in Black and White, foreword by Deems Taylor, Robert Speller, 1960. Who Killed the Congo?, Devin Adair, 1962. Jungle Saints: Africa's Heroic Catholic Missionaries, Herder & Herder, 1963. (With Josephine Schuyler) Kingdom of Dreams, Robert Speller, 1963. Good Men Die, Twin Circle, 1969. Sources Books Notable Black American Women, books 1 and 3, Gale, 1992, 2002. Talalay, Kathryn, Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler, Oxford, 1995.

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Philippa Duke Schuyler (b. August 2, 1931 – d. May 9, 1967) was a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of he
r talent, mixed-race parentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up.

Schuyler was the daughter of George S. Schuyler, a prominent African American essayist and journalist Josephine Cogdell, a European American Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty, from a former slave-owning.  Her parents believed that inter-racial marriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed-race marriage could help to solve many of the United States' social problems.

Cogdell further believed that genius could best be developed by a diet consisting exclusively of raw foods. As a result, Philippa grew up in her New York City apartment eating a diet predominantly comprised of raw carrots, peas and yams and raw steak. She was given a daily ration of cod liver oil and lemon slices in place of sweets. "When we travel," Cogdell said, "Philippa and I amaze waiters. You have to argue with most waiters before they will bring you raw meat. I guess it is rather unusual to see a little girl eating a raw steak."

Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Schuyler was reportedly able to read and write at the age of two and a half, and composed music from the age of five. At nine, she became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by Joseph Mitchell, correspondent for The New Yorker, who heard several of her early compositions and noted that she addressed both her parents by their first names.

Schuyler began giving piano recitals and radio broadcasts while still a child and attracted significant press coverage. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was one of her admirers and visited her at her home on more than one occasion. By the time she reached adolescence, Schuyler was touring constantly, both in the US and overseas.

Her talent as a pianist was widely acknowledged, although many critics believed that her forte lay in playing vigorous pieces and criticized her style when tackling more nuanced works. Acclaim for her performances led to her becoming a role model for many children in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, but Schuyler's own childhood was blighted when, during her teenage years, her parents showed her the scrapbooks they had compiled recording her life and career. The books contained numerous newspaper clippings in which both George and Josephine Schuyler commented on their beliefs and ambitions for their daughter. Realization that she had been conceived and raised, in a sense, as an experiment, robbed the pianist of many of the illusions of her youth.

In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered, particularly when performing in the United States, and much of her musical career was spent playing overseas. In her thirties, she abandoned the piano to follow her father into journalism.

Schuyler's personal life was frequently unhappy. She rejected many of her parents' values, increasingly becoming a vocal feminist, and made many attempts to pass herself off as a woman of Iberian (Spanish) descent named Felipa Monterro. Although she engaged in a number of affairs, and on one occasion endured a dangerous late-term abortion after a relationship with a Ghanaian diplomat, she never married.

Philippa Schuyler and her father, George Schuyler, were members of the John Birch Society.

In 1967, Schuyler traveled to Vietnam as a war correspondent. During a helicopter mission near Da Nang to evacuate a number of Vietnamese orphans, the helicopter crashed into the sea. While she initially survived the crash, her inability to swim caused her to drown. A court of inquiry found that the pilot had deliberately cut his motor and descended in an uncontrolled glide – possibly in an attempt to give his civilian passengers an insight into the dangers of flying in a combat zone – eventually losing control of the aircraft.

Her mother was profoundly affected by her daughter's death and committed suicide on its second anniversary.