Obituary Assignment

Grace Schmidhauser

Grace Schmidhauser, an influential performer, producer, songwriter, and activist, among other things, died in her New York home on December 4th, 2085 of old age. She was 86 years old, and was former widow to the deceased musician known as Alex G. They had two children, Harvey and Mary. Schmidhauser lived a full and influential life, and left an important mark on the music industry. She was known for encouraging female artists to prosper, and made that the focus of her career in her later years, writing her book, “Come on Gals!” at age 65 and giving many speeches on the subject.

Schmidhauser was born and raised in Austin, Texas. She started playing music at 3 years old when she discovered The Wizard of Oz and couldn’t stop singing it, and a few years later picked up the guitar and began to play a combination of classical music and covers of songs that she was fond of at the time. She then discovered a love for writing songs and performing and worked on and grew that career as she grew older. Schmidhauser released 3 solo albums while in high school. She moved to New York City after graduating from McCallum High School, a fine arts academy, to pursue a songwriting and production focused music major at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU. Schmidhauser attended at NYU for 4 years and graduated with a major in songwriting and a minor in psychology. After attending university, she stayed in New York City and eventually got a publishing deal with Warner Brothers Records, which she used to gain connections in the songwriting world and ended up writing songs for Beyonce, a famed pop star at the time. Though she wrote songs for other artists in order to make money, she always continued to pursue her own art and continued releasing albums and playing in different bands of many different genres, ranging from folk to shoegaze to punk. She gained a bit of commercial success in her own projects, but had a loyal cult following which she cherished. At the age of 45, she became a professor at New York University teaching Women’s History in Music, and many thought of her as a feminist leader in the music industry. Her and the many emerging female artists born in the millennial age led a new group of female artists into the world, women who were self-sufficient, multi-talented, and unapologetically assertive and well-educated. Schmidhauser consistently encouraged this attitude throughout her life, and inspired many to embrace the arts and be unafraid to put themselves out in the world of art and music.