In February, 2020, G. Schirmer published a set of three piano pieces by Florence B. Price (1887-1953) under the collective title Three Roses. Price composed these three exquisite character pieces in September, 1949. The manuscripts were part of the oft-reported discovery of Price manuscripts in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009, but until February, 2020, they remained unpublished, unperformed, and absent from all of the literature about Price and her works. Price champion Lara Downes released them as part of her series of Florence Price: Piano Discoveries at Valentine’s Day, and YouTube and other digital media suggest that they have found an immediate resonance in a musical world thirsty for more of the musical utterances that remained unheard even in the ongoing surge of interest in this composer and her works.
And now they have been recorded anew – with an added element of magic that Price surely would have appreciated. This past weekend Sandra Coursey, a doctoral student at Bowling Green State University, released her lovely recordings of this set with equally lovely artwork by her former student Madison Hills (now just fourteen years old) – a series of visual responses to each of Price’s three Roses. (Coursey is White, and Hills is Black.) Those artworks are shown above. And Coursey’s recordings, together with Hills’s visual renderings, are now available on YouTube: “To a Yellow Rose”; “To a White Rose” [version A]; “To a Red Rose.”
As a side note, I should remark that these three works apparently held special meaning for Price. She took the time and considerable trouble to write out two separate autographs for “To a Yellow Rose” and “To a White Rose,” and to prepare two completely different versions of the latter. She also wrote out all three scores one after another in a separate autograph (now lost) that now survives only in a diffusion-transfer negative. (All are held in the Special Collections division of the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.) Since diffusion-transfer negatives held little use for individuals but were commonly used by publishers in the 1930s and 1940s, we may surmise that Price probably submitted these pieces for publication.That effort, alas, apparently came to nothing. But the works’ special status for Price is musically reinforced by the joyous “To a Red Rose,” for in the middle section of that work (beginning at 0'57" in Coursey's recording) she quotes the beginning of the main theme of “To a Yellow Rose” – creating a thematically interconnected cycle of a sort rarely encountered in her music, and perhaps portraying the third Rose as the realization or fulfillment of the idea behind the first.
And why were the Roses special to Price? It may be significant that they were part of a set of romance-themed compositions (all newly released by Schirmer, in my editions) that Price penned in her last few years, some 15-20 years after her separation from her second husband, Percy Arnett. Or she may simply have been aware of the poignant beauty and rich imagery of each of these musical wonders.
We may never know the answer to that question. But in any case, Coursey’s description of these three Roses as “classic symbols of friendship, commitment, and love” is apt, as is her description of the works as “a special set of character pieces— refined, unmistakably expressive, and representative of Florence Price’s unique musical voice.” The idea of commissioning artworks to go along with her renditions was poetically beautiful as well; I recommend that you ponder each illustration as you listen to its corresponding musical Rose.