Louise Kemp Taylor, concert pianist and music teacher who loved to travel, has died at 96
Mrs. Taylor taught at Temple University’s Ambler campus, the Settlement School of Music in Germantown, and the Jenkintown School of Music. She also accepted select students in a private capacity.
Louise Kemp Taylor, 96, of Philadelphia, a concert pianist who taught piano lessons to generations of Philadelphia-area students, died Thursday, April 14, from complications of sepsis at Grane Hospice Care, part of the Artman Assistant Living Community in Ambler.
Mrs. Taylor taught at Temple University’s Ambler campus, the Settlement School of Music in Germantown, and the Jenkintown School of Music. She also accepted select students in a private capacity.
“There was a tremendous amount of work that she did, but she was always there for us‚” said Christopher Payne-Taylor, one of her three sons. “She was actually a really wonderful mother.”
Mrs. Taylor was known for her “incisive views, infectious sense of humor and spirited engagement with the world at large,” her family said in a statement.
Her son said both his mother and father, the late Clifford Taylor, who once headed the music composition department at Temple University in Philadelphia, performed at the Tanglewood Music Festivals at a time when Leonard Bernstein conducted.
“My father played the violin and clarinet, and of course, my mother played the piano,” he said.
Mrs. Taylor was born Sept. 26, 1925, in Pittsburgh to Hugh and Edna Kemp, the second of two daughters. Her father was a vice president for business development for Pittsburgh National Bank and her mother was a homemaker.
She studied to become a concert pianist at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and graduated with a bachelor’s degree of fine arts.
She married Clifford Taylor, who served in War War II, after he returned home from the war. They lived in Cambridge for a few years while her husband, an avant-garde composer, studied at Harvard University before moving to Philadelphia.
The family loved to have spirited dinner conversations and enjoyed vacations to Montauk, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Block Island, and Scotland. Payne-Taylor said his mother especially enjoyed vacations in Cape May.
“She was enamored with Victorian architecture and the Victorian ethos of Cape May.”
In addition to her son Christopher, Mrs. Taylor is survived by sons Andrew and Jonathan Taylor, eight grandchildren, and other family and friends.
The family asked that memorial contributions be sent to Settlement Music School, P.O Box 63966, Philadelphia 19147, or to settlementmusic.org/give.
Funeral services were April 20.