Frances McCollin

Frances McCollin (October 24, 1892 — February 25, 1960) was an American composer and musician, who was blind from early childhood. She was the first woman to win the Clemson Prize from the American Guild of Organists. In 1951, she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania.

Frances McCollin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1892, the daughter of Edward Garrett McCollin and Alice Graham Lanigan McCollin. Her father, a lawyer, had studied musical composition in college, and he wrote and performed music as a side interest throughout his life. Her grandfather, George T. Lanigan, was an Irish-Canadian poet and journalist. Her younger sister Kitty McCollin was a singer and composer.

When Frances McCollin was five years old, she became blind, probably from congenital glaucoma. Her parents and extended family took an energetic approach to her education at home, focused on music. When she started to compose in girlhood, her father was her first teacher and transcriber. As a child, she described sensations consistent with synaesthesia, associating musical keys and colors (green for E major, pink for F major, for example). As a young woman she studied with fellow blind musician David Duffield Wood, the organist at St. Stephen's Church in Philadelphia, and at the Pennsylvania Institute for Instruction of the Blind.

In her lifetime, McCollin's works were performed frequently by professional and amateur vocal ensembles, and by orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Vancouver Symphony, and others. She met Marian Anderson, Igor Stravinsky, Amy Beach, and other musicians and composers, usually in connection with her mother's work with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Fabien Sevitzky, Eugene Ormandy, and Leopold Stokowski took particular interest in her compositions. McCollin defended Stokowski programming The Internationale for a Philadelphia youth concert in 1934.

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