Jessie Baetz

Who is Jessie Baetz?

Jessie Baetz was a Canadian-American artist, composer, and pianist.

She was a native of Toronto, Canada, where she studied and taught at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, now known as the Royal Conservatory of Music. She immigrated to New York, where 1930s census records list her occupation as “painter,” and her art was included in an exhibit at the Jumble Shop on West 8th Street. She studied with another ultramodernist composer, Johanna Beyer, played on Beyer’s concerts for the New York Composers’ Forum, and showed clear signs of Beyer and Henry Cowell’s influence in her experimental compositional techniques such as tone clusters, polymeters, and string piano techniques. Her own works were performed in the Composers’ Forum on December 15, 1937.