She enrolled in 1925 in the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where she studied piano with Alfred Cortot.

[3] After divorcing in 1934 she moved to New York City, where she directed the Social Music Program at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, working with elderly Jewish immigrants.

In this capacity she began collecting recordings of folk music in Appalachia, the Ozarks and the Upper Midwest.

The project was one of the earliest attempts at conducting a large-scale ethnographic survey of American folk music in a defined region.

In addition to 35 hours of sound recordings, the team complied 168 photographs of the musicians and their instruments and copious documentation.