Mary Carr Moore

Mary Carr Moore (6 August 1873 - 9 January 1957) was an American composer, conductor, vocalist, and music educator of the twentieth century. She is best remembered today for her association with the musical life of the West Coast.

Moore was born Mary Louise Carr on August 6, 1873, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Unitarian minister Sarah Pratt Carr and her husband Byron Oscar Carr. She passed her childhood in Memphis and Louisville, Kentucky until the age of ten, when her family moved to the West Coast. Here she would live for the rest of her life. Gifted musically from an early age, Moore began her studies in San Francisco, taking composition lessons from J. H. Pratt and studying singing with H. B. Pasmore. She had begun teaching and composing by 1889; a song she wrote that year was later published. In 1894 she took the lead in her first operetta, The Oracle, when it was premiered by an amateur group in San Francisco. The following year, she gave up singing to devote herself fully to teaching and composition. In 1895 she began teaching in Lemoore, California, moving to Seattle in 1901.

While in Seattle, Moore began work on her second, and most ambitious, stage work. Titled Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire, the four-act grand opera told the story of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the attack on their mission in Walla Walla in 1847. Sarah Carr wrote the libretto. Several distinguished artists were imported from New York City to perform in the premiere, held in Seattle in 1912. No conductor was available; consequently, Moore herself took to the podium. The opera failed to gain a place in the repertory, and soon disappeared, although Moore conducted revivals in San Francisco in 1925 and Los Angeles in 1945.

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