1. Mildred Couper was a prominent composer and pianist, and one of the first American musicians to experiment with quarter-tone music.
11 Facts About Mildred Couper
1. 2.
Mildred Couper's father was born in England; her mother was born in Argentina to Wilson Jacobs III and Harriet Hathaway Moores, both American-born.
3.
Mildred Couper began her serious musical studies at the Williams Conservatory in Argentina, and pursued further training in Italy, Germany and France, where she studied piano with Moritz Moszkowski and composition with Nadia Boulanger.
4.
Mildred Couper taught piano for nine years at the David Mannes Music School in New York.
5.
Mildred Couper moved with her children to California in 1927 and established a studio in Santa Barbara, where she started her experiments with two pianos by tuning the first a quarter tone higher than the second.
6.
Mildred Couper wrote incidental music for plays at the Lobero and a dance-opera, And on Earth Peace, with libretto by Scottish-Argentine artist Malcolm Thurburn.
7.
Mildred Cooper married American expatriate artist Richard Hamilton Couper in 1910, and they had two children, Clive and Rosalind, both born in Rome.
8.
Mildred Couper was widowed soon after, when her husband died during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
9.
Mildred Couper died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1974, aged 86 years.
10.
Mildred Couper's papers are archived in the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
11.
Mildred Couper Cooper's first cousin Harry Norman Jacobs was the grandfather of Argentine-born composer Carlos Michans, who resides in the Netherlands since 1982.