Margaret Elizabeth Hamerik (1867–1942), née Williams, grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, USA. After high school, at the age of 17, she was admitted to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she majored in piano and studied music theory and violin as secondary subjects. She was taught by the Danish composer Asger Hamerik (1843–1923) in music theory, whom she married in 1894. After completing her diploma examination in 1888, she continued to study music theory and composition for further three years, during which her principal assignment was a concert overture. For this work she received the faculty’s Diploma for Distinguished Musicianship, a distinction that was only rarely awarded.
During the 1880s she began composing the opera Colombus, which she never completed. Only the opera’s Introduction and Mermaids’ Chorus were finished, and these were performed in 1893. In 1891, the composer P. I. Tchaikovsky visited the Peabody Conservatory, where he saw the score of the Introduction and Mermaids’ Chorus and allegedly praised it.
At her graduation concert in 1891, her String Quartet in A major, Piano Sonata in C minor, and three songs were performed. Subsequently she gave numerous concerts throughout Tennessee and taught piano, both privately and at the conservatory, and in 1893 she won a prize for her string quartet.
In 1894 she married her former teacher Asger Hamerik, and the couple moved to Denmark. Together they had four children: the two daughters, Gerda and Valdis, both became opera singers, while their son Ebbe became a composer and conductor.Like many other female composers of the period, she discontinued her compositional career after her marriage. After the family moved to Copenhagen, Margaret Hamerik became a member of the board of the Women’s Reading Society (Kvindelig Læseforening), where she selected which English literature should be translated into Danish and included in the society’s collection. She also privately translated several musicological texts into English, including Knud Jeppesen’s Der Palestrinastil und die Dissonanz (1927) and her brother-in-law Angul Hammerich’s Musik-Mindesmærker fra Middelalderen i Danmark (1912).