Moore was originally trained as a classical pianist, but developed a compositional output of mostly vocal music—her preferred genre.

[6] Her hometown of Jarratt, Virginia, consisted of a large African-American population, and she would later recall memories of the community singing and praying at the Morningstar Baptist Church.

Smith turned down a scholarship to Petersburg's Virginia Normal Institute in order to enroll at Fisk, a historically black college.

[7] In 1924, the Juilliard School granted Smith their first ever scholarship to a student at Fisk, allowing her to continue her undergraduate studies.

[7] In 1931, during the Harlem Renaissance, Smith received a Master of Arts and professional diploma in music at Columbia University's Teachers College.

[11] In 1938, Smith married Dr. James Arthur Moore, the chair of the physical education department at Virginia State College.

[4] In 1975, Moore was labeled music laureate of the state of Virginia, and the National Association of Negro Musicians named her an "outstanding educator".

I thought them so beautiful that I wanted to have them experienced in a variety of ways -- by concert choirs, soloists, and by instrumental groups.

[28]In 1953, Moore composed the "powerful and dissonant" piano solo Before I'd be a Slave, "characterized by tone clusters, bitonality, and quartal harmonies"[26]—a significant step away from her tonal vocal writing.

"[31] As for the influence of African-American traditional music, Walker-Hill writes: [Moore’s] ‘black idiom’ was the use of additive and syncopated rhythms, scale structures with gaps, call and response antiphony, rich timbres, melody influenced by rhythm, the frequent use of the interval of the third and, less frequently, fourths and fifths, nonhomophonic textures, and the ‘deliberate use of striking climax with almost unrestrained fullness.’[31]In a volume of The Choral Journal, Carl Harris analyzes Moore's music as being influenced by "ragtime, blues, jazz, and gospel music".

[31] Of the philosophy of her music, Smith Moore stated: ...in retrospect, it seems I have often been concerned with aspiration, the emotional intensity associated with the life of black people as expressed in the various rites of the church and black life in general – the... desire for abundant, full expression as one might anticipate or expect from an oppressed people determined to survive.

[36] The 16-part oratorio is based on the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and written for chorus, orchestra, solo voices and narrator.

[25] Undine Smith Moore was outspoken on her thoughts surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and the impact it had on her music.