Peggy Stuart Coolidge

Peggy Stuart Coolidge (19 July 1913 – 7 May 1981) was an American composer and conductor. She was one of the first female American composers to have a recording devoted to her symphonic works, and the first American composer (male or female) to have a concert devoted entirely to her works presented in the Soviet Union. Although she does not quote particular melodies, her compositional style is accessible and influenced by American folk and popular idioms; her success at creating a distinctly American musical voice places her among such figures as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Peggy Stuart was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts. After the war she moved to New York City, and started a research project in music psychotherapy at a mental institution. In 1952 she married Joseph R. Coolidge, a freelance writer from Boston who was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and a decorated Army captain and OSS operative who’d been wounded in French Indochina soon after World War II. Together they wrote a number of children’s stories with Peggy’s background music, and other songs in traditional folk style. She wrote her only film score for The Silken Affair, starring David Niven, in