1820–1882 · United States · Romantic
Augusta Browne (1820–1882), a Dublin-born American, worked as a composer, publisher and writer. She composed for piano and voice and launched the first wave of women composers in the United States. Her works for voice and piano are available on the site.
Augusta Browne was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1820, one of nine children. Her father David crossed to Boston in 1826 and set up a music academy.
Augusta was known as a prodigy: at seven she played works by Dussek, and by sixteen she was already performing her own music in public.
Browne wrote more than two hundred works for piano and voice, along with many hymns and secular pieces. The scholar Judith Tick names her among the most prolific women composers in America before 1870.
She often worked with lyricists and set their texts to music. One of her best-known works is Wake, Lady Mine, written in 1845.
Browne also brought out two books. The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations was one; the other, Hamilton, the Young Artist, was about her younger brother and was written after he died. Her output included essays, religious tracts, poems and short stories too.
She did not write about domestic life. Her subjects were the things she cared about most: music, literature, the fine arts and Christianity. That put her alongside a small circle of women authors such as Margaret Fuller.
One of Browne's best-known articles deals with the minstrel music of the mid-nineteenth century. The author's opinion stirred controversy, yet several music journals ran the piece again.
Browne married John Walter Benjamin Garrett, a North Carolina portrait painter, in 1855. He died in 1858. They had no children who survived.
Augusta Browne died in Washington, D.C., on 11 January 1882. Her grave is in Green-Wood Cemetery, New York. In 2020 the University of Rochester Press issued the first full-length biography of her, written by Bonny H. Miller.
Browne wrote works for piano and voice, as well as hymns and secular pieces. She often collaborated with authors of texts and composed music to their words.
The site has three of her works for voice and piano. Forever Thine is at the upper-intermediate level and is the most accessible of the three. The Reply of the Messenger Bird and The Song of the Skylark are at the advanced level.