Education
Alderman further taught history and music in Portland and attended summer music classes at the University of California in Berkeley in 1918. Alderman attended New York Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard School of Music), where she was a student of Percy Goetschius, in 1923.
Career
B January 16, 1893 in Lafayette, Oregon - d October 11, 1983 in Los Angeles, California) was an American musicologist and composer. Alderman received training in piano and organ, as well as in English and German literature in her youth. Her first teaching career started at the McMinnville junior high school in 1916 where she taught English literature.
Between 1920-1923 she became a student of Carolyn Alchin, while she was teaching at the Ellison-White Conservatory of Music, then newly founded Conservatory in Portland.
A year later, she started to teach piano, music theory and history of music at the Pomona College in Claremont, California. Later, from 1928 to 1930, she taught at the University of Washington, then music and literature at the University of Southern California ( University of Southern California) in Los Angeles, where she earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Alderman had classes with Arnold Schönberg. She moved to Europe in 1938, where she decided to take lessons from Donald Francis Tovey at the University of Edinburgh.
Later at the University of Strasbourg.
Completing her studies she returned to Los Angeles in 1940, where she was back teaching at the University of Southern California. ( University of Southern California) While teaching, she had composition lessons with Ernst Toch and Lucien Cailliet. Alderman presented her dissertation at University of Southern California which she named it Antoine Bad Secretariat and the Air de Cour.
In year 1952, she became the first Chairwoman of the Department of Music History and Literature which she founded, until her retirement in 1960.
University of Southern California in its publication, Musicology at University of Southern California, A Handbook for Graduate Students 2007–2008, wrote:
The International Congress on Women in Music sponsored by International Alliance for Women in Music has established the Pauline Alderman Award for musicological and journalistic works on women in music in 1982.