Flora Edna White, known professionally as Edna White and privately for much of her life as Edna White Chandler, was an American classical and vaudevilletrumpet player, bandleader, and composer. A child prodigy, she led one of the first successful all-female bands, and was the first trumpet player to give a recital at Carnegie Hall.
Biography
She was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and, with her father's support, began playing the cornet at the age of seven. She gave her first public performance at the age of nine. At 11, after an invitation from Frank Damrosch, she entered the Institute of Musical Art in New York City, where, under the instruction of Adolphe Dubois, she switched from the cornet to the trumpet. She graduated at the age of 14 in 1907. She then began performing professionally, and in 1908 formed an all-female quartet of trumpets and cornets, known as the Trunette Quartet or Aida Quartet. In 1913, she married Myron H. Chandler in Marion, Indiana; they had a son, but divorced a few years later. She continued to use the name Chandler in her later private life. In 1914 she formed the Edna White Trumpet Quartet, and in March 1915 she played "Silver Threads Among the Gold" at the opening ceremony of the first transcontinental telephone transmission between Brooklyn and San Francisco. By 1916, White started recording with opera singer Torcom Bézazian, who became her second husband. She recorded for several companies, including Columbia Records, for whom her quartet's recording of "Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight " was successful in 1918. The following year she formed the Gloria Trumpeters, with two trumpets and two trombones, and during the 1920s toured on the Keith vaudeville circuit with Bézazian. She featured works by George Antheil and Virgil Thomson, performed with the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra and the Rochester Park Band, and recorded both solo and with her group for both Edison Records and Columbia. One of her 1920 recordings for Edison, "The Debutante", is said to demonstrate "a command of the instrument and level of musicianship that would have enhanced the brass section of any symphony orchestra." During the 1930s, she began to make regular appearances on radio, and also sang in musicals. In February 1949, she played the first ever solo trumpet recital in Carnegie Hall, at which she gave the inaugural performance of Virgil Thomson's At The Beach and Georges Enescu's Légende to great acclaim. She returned to Carnegie Hall to give her final recital, Farewell to My Trumpet, in 1957. In later years she wrote a manual on trumpet technique, and wrote several works for the trumpet, including Suite for Solo Trumpet and Symphony Orchestra, which was recorded by Gaeton Berton with the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, and On Taming the Devil's Tongue. She also wrote several books of poetry. In 1982 she published a cassette of recordings and reminiscences, Life with My Trumpet, and in 1990 published a memoir of her time in vaudeville, The Night the Camel Sang: a true romance of vaudeville. Edna White died in 1992, four months short of what would have been her 100th birthday. In 2011, Susan Fleet published Women Who Dared: Trailblazing 20th Century Musicians, a dual biography of White and Maud Powell, a pioneering woman violinist. Fleet was also responsible for depositing White's papers in the Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music at Rochester.
