Carmen Brouard, Haiti’s pioneering woman composer, dies in Montreal at ninety-six

Carmen Brouard died in Montreal on 11 December 2005, aged ninety-six. Sister of the indigenist poet Carl Brouard and daughter of a mayor of Port-au-Prince, she trained at the Paris Conservatoire and gave her first concert at the Parisiana in October 1929, playing her own composition. She taught in Port-au-Prince for decades (Édouard Woolley was among her pupils), settled in Quebec in 1977, and co-founded the Société de Recherches et de Diffusion de la Musique Haïtienne.