Annie Jenkins

Jenkins, Annie

Annie (Margaret) Jenkins (b Lampman). Pianist, organist, choir director, teacher, b Morpeth, near Chatham, Upper Canada (Ontario), 14 May 1866, d Ottawa 12 Jul 1952. A sister of the poet Archibald Lampman, she studied piano with J.D. Kerrison and Waugh Lauder, organ with Edgar Doward in Toronto, and piano 1887-9 with Martin Krause in Leipzig. In 1889 the Leipzig critics praised her clear and delicate performance of the Grieg Concerto. Krause considered her Bach playing a very model. In Ottawa, where Lampman had settled in 1885, she appeared in recital as early as 1886, playing Schumann's Fantasy, Opus 17, the piano part in the same composer's Quintet, Opus 44, and other music. She became a teacher at Ottawa's Martin Krause School of Pianoforte Playing and Singing (named for the Leipzig teacher and propounding his methods) and later at the Canadian Conservatory of Music (Ottawa), teaching voice and piano.

For more than 20 years Lampman was organist-choirmaster at St George's Church. She was a charter member of the Morning Music Club of Ottawa and its president 1920-8. In 1921 she founded the Palestrina Choir, which emphasized unaccompanied singing, and until late in life she remained active as accompanist and teacher. She was Canada's first outstanding woman pianist, but the limited professional opportunities in Ottawa during her lifetime inhibited the development of her gifts to the full.

In 1892 Lampman married Frank Maurice Stinson Jenkins (b Kingston, Upper Canada, 6 Jul 1859, d Ottawa 5 Dec 1930), founder and conductor of the Ottawa Amateur Orchestral Society (1894-1900), the Ottawa Choral Society and the Schubert Club (1894), and organist at several Ottawa churches. Their daughter Dorothy Jenkins McCurry (b Ottawa 6 Nov 1899, d there 29 Aug 1973) was a noted music teacher, choir director (Studio Singers), and musical organizer in Ottawa. Papers documenting the careers of all three are held by the National Library of Canada.