Natalie Hinderas

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Natalie Hinderas, born Natalie Leota Henderson Hinderas on June 15, 1927, in Oberlin, Ohio, was an American pianist, composer, and professor at Temple University in Pennsylvania. She grew up in a musical family—her father, Abram, was a jazz pianist and her mother, Leota Palmer, was a classical pianist who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Natalie began playing at three and took formal piano and violin lessons from age six. A child prodigy, she gave her first full recital at eight. In 1945 she earned a Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory as its youngest student. She studied further at Juilliard with Olga Samaroff and at the Philadelphia Conservatory with Edward Steuermann, adopting the name Natalie Hinderas.

Her career gained speed after a 1954 Town Hall debut. She toured the United States, Europe, and the West Indies, with two state-sponsored tours of Africa and Asia. In the mid-1950s NBC signed her to perform on its stations nationwide. In 1971 she became the first Black musician to give a subscription concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, paving the way for many more. She also appeared with the Los Angeles, Cleveland, Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago symphony orchestras, and she played works such as Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

Hinderas worked to promote and record music by Black composers, including R. Nathaniel Dett, Thomas Henderson Kerr Jr., William Grant Still, John W. Work, and George Walker. She received the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College. She was a full professor at Temple University when she died of cancer on July 22, 1987. She had also taught at Howard University, where one of her pupils was Pearl Williams-Jones.