Studies at Howard University and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger gave Dorothy Rudd Moore the tools needed to craft works rich in expressive intensity and heavyweight emotional muscle. For a flavor of her art’s inventive flair and serious demeanor, head to Dirge and Deliverance (1971) with its hair-raising cello cries, pounding piano chords, and sublime transcendence of anger. Moore’s feeling for tonal shadings and textural contrasts add layers of complexity that run deep beneath the surface of her work, strikingly so in the otherworldly dialogue between clarinet and piano in the first of her two Night Fantasy pieces (1978) and the scintillating virtuosity of its “Allegro” companion. As a co-founder of the Society of Black Composers (1968-73), she championed the cause of African-America music with a passion that registers with shattering force in the “4th of July Speech” from her opera Frederick Douglass (1985).