Biography

Noted American artist, who, thru her active interest in modern music and principally as an exponent of the music of Scriabin, has been honored with an invitation to play before the British Music Society in Aeolian Hall, London, England. 

The Billboard, April 2, 1921.

Katherine Ruth Heyman was born in Sacramento, CA in 1872. After spending her early years in California, she studied in Berlin during the early 1890s, and returned there to study with Heinrich Barth during the 1910s. Upon returning to the U.S., she resided in Detroit and New York; later she would live in London and Paris, and spend time in other European cities. She died in 1944 while residing in New York.

The daughter of a professional violinist, Heyman studied piano from an early age and undertook a wide variety of musical endeavors, including lecturing, writing, accompanying, and teaching. Best known as a pianist who specialized in the music of Alexander Scriabin, she was credited as highly influential in popularizing his music in America. Heyman wrote at least 70 compositions, mostly solo songs and piano music. According to her 1918 bio in the International Who's Who in Music and Musical Gazetteer, her composition teachers included Arthur Farwell, Carolyn Alchin, and Emerson Whithorne.

Heyman saw herself as a proponent of the modern in music. Her 1921 book, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music, grew out of a series of lectures that she gave in the 1910s. Each of the five chapters is a version of one of her “conferences.” In addition to the more general topics of mode, rhythm, and connections between modern poetry and music, she devotes one chapter each to Debussy and Scriabin. On March 5, 1928, she presented a "the first speech on music ever made in English for the Sorbonne Station of the Radio Institute," focusing on modern music. This lecture was apparently given as part of a program on which she premiered the "Emerson" movement of Charles Ives's Concord Sonata.

Writing, lecturing, and performing were not Heyman’s only methods of promoting new music. She founded the Scriabin Circle (precursor of the Scriabin Society of America) in 1934. Eight years prior, she co-founded with Ivan Wyschnegradsky (Wischnegradsky) and Nicolai Obhukov (Obouhov) the Groupe Estival pour la musique moderne, a summer school in Paris devoted to the study of new music: its performance, composition, and analysis along with its relation to the ancient. According to a promotional letter from 1933, the Groupe's purpose was "to revive the consciousness of the origin and power of music as attributed by the mythology of all races. … The Groupe believes that the world today has special need of the ancient art, enriched by 1000 years of harmonic development, as a spiritually revivifying influence."

The bibliography linked below provides a list of scholarly sources with information about Heyman. Because she is so little known, some of the information is incorrect. For example, sources list her birth year variously as 1874, 1879, or 1882, but I am confident that she was actually born in 1872. (This is the year given on her first passport application, and in the 1880 census, she is listed as 8 years old, albeit with her first and last names misspelled.)

A bibliography of scholarship concerning Heyman can be found here.

All photos on this website are from the Music Clippings File on Heyman in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.