Over the course of her nearly seven decade career as a composer, she wrote the chamber opera The Women in the Garden (1978), the dissonant piece The Great Wall of China (1946), the 1944 composition Concertante for Piano and Orchestra and well over one hundred other acclaimed musical works. When she was only five years old, she received a piano scholarship to the Chicago Musical College. Eight years later, she began her career as a composer, and, by age sixteen, had debuted her work in both New York and Chicago.
