Researching Jean Ivey

Though her childhood was impacted by the Great Depression and her father's loss of his job as editor of the anti-feminist serial The Woman Patriot, Jean Eichelberger won a full-tuition scholarship at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. where she graduated with her bachelor's degree in 1944. Subsequently, she earned master's degrees in piano performance from Peabody Conservatory, composition from the Eastman School of Music, and her Doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1972.

She founded the Peabody Electronic Music Studio in 1967, and taught composition and electronic music at the Peabody Conservatory of Music until her retirement. Most of her electronics works are composed for mixed mediums including acoustic instruments and voice. The Baltimore Symphony premiered two of her works which combine tape with orchestra, and her music has been recorded on the CRI, Folkways and Grenadilla labels. Her publishers include Boosey and Hawkes, Carl Fischer, Inc. and E.C. Schirmer.

Ivey is listed in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Who's Who in America. She is also the subject of a half-hour documentary film prepared in Washington: A Woman Is... a Composer. Her awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, annual ASCAP awards since 1972, the Peabody Director's Recognition Award, and the Peabody Distinguished Alumni Award.

On her compositional ideals, Ivey wrote: "I consider all the musical resources of the past and present as being at the composer's disposal, but always in the service of the effective communication of humanistic ideas and intuitive emotion."

Her many notable composition students include Michael Hedges, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Geoffrey Dorian Wright, Richard Dudas, McGregor Boyle, Vivian Adelberg Rudow, Lynn F. Kowal and Daniel Crozier.