Podcasts · Episode
NoteWorthy: Valerie Capers
Program: NoteWorthy
Aired: Monday, September 1, 2025
Hosted by Loki Karuna
You don’t have to be able to see to have a musical vision. Think about it: folks like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder did just fine for themselves, right? Well the same reality exists on the classical side of things, as well. Greetings – I’m Loki Karuna, and for this edition of Noteworthy it’s the music of a musician who had lots of vision: composer Valerie Capers.
Valerie was born in New York, spending much of her time uptown in the Bronx. An illness deprived her of her sight when she was about 6 years old, so her earliest education took place at New York’s Institute for the Education of the Blind, where she was first exposed to Braille musical notation. She’d grow up not only to become Juilliard’s first blind graduate, but also to teach at New York’s finest institutions, all while expanding her compositional palette to include the sounds of blues and jazz. This tune that she called Subrosa, is among her earlier recordings.
About a decade after graduating from Juilliard, Ms. Capers worked at the Manhattan School of Music, where she was not only an advisor to blind students, but also a lead developer of the school’s jazz curriculum. This, alongside her many other accomplishments, makes it easy for anyone to see why she’s among America’s most noteworthy.
Noteworthy is a production of WDAV classical public radio.