A child prodigy, she left her native Virginia to enroll at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where she studied with Josef and Rosina Lhévinne.

During World War II, she played the Western broadcast and concert premieres of Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Sonata No.

The death of her husband in an automobile accident in 1964 compelled her to abandon her career as a pianist, destroy her personal documents, and become a musicologist.

By age seven her pianistic skill drew the notice of the local press:[4] In little Miss Brodsky ... Norfolk has a musical prodigy.

[4]She subsequently moved to New York City with her family, where she attended the Juilliard School of Music on a scholarship,[5] and performed at Steinway Hall.

During this period, Brodsky Lawrence and Triggs taught piano duo performance at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute of Music.

[16] Her programs for these broadcasts included music by Chasins,[17] Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernst von Dohnányi,[18] Alec Templeton,[19] and Stanley Bate.

She partnered with singers, including soprano Eileen Farrell,[21] as well as with chamber musicians such as the Dorian Quartet, among whose members were Bernard Greenhouse, with whom she played a cycle of works by Johannes Brahms.

[27] During World War II, Brodsky Lawrence played the Western premieres of works by two major Soviet composers.

[30] On June 21, 1944, Brodsky Lawrence played the Western broadcast premiere of a waltz from Sergei Prokofiev's opera War and Peace, the first time any of its music was heard in the United States.

[33] During the 1950s, Brodsky Lawrence played on television with Percy Faith[34] and Triggs; she had revived her piano duo with the latter in 1959,[35] appearing in August on an episode of Camera Three entitled "Fête for Four Hands".

[36] On January 11, 1964, Theodore Lawrence died at St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan from injuries incurred in an automobile accident earlier that day.

[38]Brodsky Lawrence subsequently destroyed her personal documents and abandoned the piano in favor of musicology: "I couldn't see myself as a little old lady sitting in a rocking chair fingering yellowed press clippings.

[40] These were published by Arno Press in a five-volume set in 1970,[41] the first time a complete works edition had been compiled for an American composer.

[38] In 1971, she edited a two-volume set of the works of Scott Joplin, a project that was published by the New York Public Library with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation.

[44] She was hailed by the New York Daily News in 1975 as the "queen of ragtime", a term she disliked:[40] Ms. Lawrence is the one who dug Scott Joplin out of the dust of libraries, took him away from the specialists, and set him loose on the world.

She supervised the 1972 world premiere of the opera at Morehouse College in Atlanta, but the production by Katherine Dunham was received poorly,[45] and Brodsky Lawrence was dissatisfied with it.