Nevilla E. Ottley-Adjahoe

Nevilla E. Ottley-Adjahoe is the founder of the Ottley Music School (OMS), established in 1973, eighteen months after she graduated with her Master of Arts in organ performance and music history from Andrews University in Michigan, where she had earned her Bachelor of Music in Music Education and Piano Performance. Ottley produced and hosted “Classics of Ebony” a one-hour weekly show on WGTS 91.9 fm from 1976-1997 on classical music composed by Black composers, and also music performed by Black artists in the classical styles.

Ottley with a friend, Dr. Ellen Bunyan, founded the Takoma Park Symphony (1987-1995) which besides the music of the known masters, also performed the music of Black composers, and was part of the Washington Post’s “Critics Pick” in February, 1990. “Takoma Park Symphony Orchestra, presenting orchestral music of black composers, Sunday afternoon in the Takoma Park Seventh-Day Adventist Church.” She has also conducted the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra and the World Bank IMF Choral and Orchestral Society.

Ottley has also done seminars at various universities on Black Composers, Oakwood University (Huntsville, AL), Columbia Union College—now renamed as Washington Adventist University (Takoma Park, MD), those back in the 1990s. She also presented seminar on orchestral music of Black Composers at the University of Nairobi to 26 conductors, and one on choral music of Black composers at Central Nairobi Seventh-day Adventist Church in Kenya back in 2006. She taught a semester of zoom classes (Jan.-May) to 85 for the Encore Creativity University (choral) on Black composers in 2021, and serves as the historian for Coalition for African American in the Performing Arts (CAAPA), for whom her OMS students also perform.

Ottley is the author of four books on Black composers and performers, and one co-authored by Mayme Wilkins Holt on her son, Ben Holt baritone opera singer. Still’s Life in Pictures was written for the Centennial Celebration of William Grant Still she instigated in May 1995 in the Washington D.C. area.