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TRAGIC MULATTO GIRL WONDER: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler | Lise Funderburg

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COMPOSITION IN BLACK AND WHITE: The Life of Philippa Schuyler by Kathryn Talalay Oxford University Press (317 pp.) hardcover: $30, ISBN 0-19-509608-8 As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and

TRAGIC MULATTO GIRL WONDER: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler | Lise Funderburg TRAGIC MULATTO GIRL WONDER: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler By Lise Funderburg QBR The Black Book Review February/March 1996 COMPOSITION IN BLACK AND WHITE: The Life of Philippa Schuyler by Kathryn Talalay Oxford University Press (317 pp.) hardcover: $30, ISBN 0-19-509608-8 As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlw

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