Hoover began writing music in earnest in the early 1970s, a time when few women were having success in the male-dominated world of classical composing, and she was still creating new works into this decade.
Katherine Hoover, a composer and flutist who wrote not only for her instrument but also for strings, piano, woodwinds, full orchestra and voice, died Friday in Manhattan. She was 80.
Her son, Norman Schwab, said the cause was a stroke.
Hoover began writing music in earnest in the early 1970s, a time when few women were having success in the male-dominated world of classical composing, and she was still creating new works into this decade.
She wrote pieces for a solo instrument and piano, like “Ritual” (1989), for clarinet. She wrote a bassoon quartet (1976) and a saxophone quartet (1980). She wrote “Medieval Suite” (1984), a five-movement orchestral work that she said was inspired by “A Distant Mirror,” Barbara W. Tuchman’s book about the 14th century.
Hoover’s best-known work, though, was probably “Kokopeli” (1990), a piece for flute that was inspired, as were a number of her other compositions, by American Indian music and culture.
“Kokopeli, the flute player, was a great mahu, or legendary hero of the Hopi, and of other Native Americans living in the Southwestern area of the United States,” she wrote in a program note. “He is said to have led the migrations through the mountains and deserts, the sound of his flute echoing through the great canyons and cliffs. In this piece I have tried to capture some of this sense of spaciousness, and of the Hopi’s deep kinship with this land.”
Hoover, who also played professionally, won the National Flute Association’s lifetime achievement award in 2016.
The flutist Nina Perlove once wrote of the alluring power of Hoover’s works:
“Katherine is a storyteller, and the stories she recounts are ancient whisperings that resonate with a primal sense of mythological archetypes.”
The flutist Zara Lawler, in an email interview, spoke of the pleasures of playing Hoover’s compositions.
“Katherine was a rare composer in that her music is challenging and satisfying for musicians to play, and yet at the same time, beautiful and meaningful for audiences to hear,” Lawler wrote. “Her music leaves you lots of room to express yourself, and yet any performance of her music is indelibly hers.”
Katherine Lacy Hoover was born Dec. 2, 1937, in Elkin, West Virginia. Her father, Samuel, was a chemist, and her mother, Katherine (Lacy) Hoover, was an artist and editor.
Hoover grew up in the Philadelphia area and received a bachelor’s degree in music theory and a performance certificate in flute in 1959 from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. She was already encountering the obstacles that at the time faced any woman who aspired to be a composer.
“For boys, and even more so for girls, in music school there was a sense of ‘What are you doing, writing? Who do you think you are, Beethoven?’ ” she said in an interview with Lawler for a 2013 issue of the New York Flute Club’s newsletter. “It was really not a good attitude. ‘All the good music has been written’ was basically it.
“And I was the only female in class, with six guys, all grad students,” she continued. “I was an undergrad, and I just sat there, and they never bothered to look at my work, and that’s the way it was.”
In the 1960s, Hoover focused on performing and taught flute in the pre-college division at the Juilliard School and elsewhere. In 1969, she began teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, while also resuming her studies and earning a master’s degree in music theory there in 1974.
It was during this time that she began composing in a serious way — though finding time to do so was difficult.
“When I started to write, I had a young child,” she said in the interview with Lawler. “And the only time I had to write, once I decided I really, really wanted to do this, was in the morning after I took him to preschool. I had a couple of hours and that was it.”
The dozens of works she eventually produced have been performed by some 60 groups, among them the Santa Fe Symphony, the Colorado Quartet, the New Jersey Chamber Music Society, the Sylvan Wind Quintet and the New York Virtuoso Singers. In 1994, she conducted the Harrisburg Symphony in the premiere of her orchestral tone poem “Night Skies.” Prominent flutists like Carol Wincenc, Julius Baker and Eugenia Zukerman have also performed her pieces.
“She wasn’t one to talk of her legacy, but she was certainly proud of all that she had accomplished,” her son said by email. In addition to her composing and performances, he noted another accomplishment: She started her own publishing company, Papagena Press, to disseminate her work.
“It meant she didn’t have to go hat in hand to the big houses to get a new work in front of people,” he said.
Hoover’s first marriage, to John Schwab, ended in divorce in the 1970s. In addition to her son, she is survived by her husband, Richard Goodwin, whom she married in 1985, and three grandchildren.
Lawler remembered Hoover as a woman who was both creative and practical.
“She gives you inspiration, and also a screwdriver to fix your flute,” she said. “I keep a tiny screwdriver from her in my flute case!”
From the time she was a teenager, Hoover enjoyed writing poetry, but she mostly kept it to herself until late in life. In 2015, with the encouragement of friends and family members, she published a book of her poems, “This Way About.”
One poem in the collection is called “Music, My Love.” It concludes this way:
Music, my love,
you have taken my hand
in sorrow and led me
from darkness.
You have taught me grace
and forgiveness.
Music, my love,
you whisper to me
of paradise.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.