Mary Hallock-Greenewalt

Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt (Sept. 8, 1871 – Nov. 27, 1950) was an inventor and pianist who performed with the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphonies as a soloist. She is best known for her invention of a type of visual music she called Nourathar.

Thomas Eakins painted her portrait in 1903, currently in the Roland P. Murdock Collection of the Wichita Museum of Art.

Biography

Greenewalt was born in 1871 in Beirut, then part of Syria, to Samuel Hallock and Sara Tabet. After her mother began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness, eleven-year-old Greenewalt and her siblings were sent to live with friends and relatives in the US, where Greenewalt spent the remainder of her youth in the Philadelphia area. As a young adult Greenewalt studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and then with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna. After her return to Philadelphia she married Frank L. Greenewalt, a physician. The couple had one son, Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, a chemical engineer who eventually served as president of the DuPont Company. In her later years Greenewalt resided in Wilmington, Delaware. She died in Philadelphia at the age of 79.