A FLORENCE PRICE POSTHUMOUS PREMIERE

Moods for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano at the International Florence Price Festival

NO ONE has been more assiduous about ensuring that the hundreds of compositions by Florence Price that were for decades silenced by the closed doors of the white-dominated music-publishing industry finally grace modern ears than award-winning pianist Kevin Wayne Bumpers. Readers of this post probably are acquainted with the remarkable series of videorecorded performances of Price’s long-suppressed compositions that Professor Bumpers, coordinator of the Keyboards Arts Area at Miami-Dade College and founder and artistic director of the MDC High School Piano Competition and the Piano Sonata Competition there, has produced as those works have come out.  But those videorecordings are just the tip of the iceberg. And now Professor Bumpers, together with two of his excellent students, are bringing a long-silenced masterpiece from Price’s late years to life for the first time in modern memory – all before an assembled community of performers and scholars who are leading the charge of the Florence Price movement.

            The work in question is Moods, written for flute, clarinet, and piano, published just this past August by ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR) – home to seminal first wave of posthumous Florence Price editions that began appearing under the editorship of Prof. Barbara Garvey Jackson just a few years after the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Libraries acquired the trove of Price papers found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009. The story of that house and the papers it sheltered for more than half a century is for another post on this blog. What matters here is that under the guidance of the redoubtable Glendower Jones, ClarNan continues the charge ensure that all those ingenious pieces by Florence Price that have been so long silenced can now find their place in modern musical life in study and teaching, performance and listening.

And it matters that Moods is one of the most recent beneficiaries of that leadership.

            Let me just say a few words about this piece that ClarNan has now made accessible, and that Professor Bumpers and his colleagues brought to life at PriceFest today (October 5):

• It was originally conceived (Version 1) in the late 1930s or early 1940s as consisting of two movements and was written for clarinet, piano, and violin (not flute).

  

  Figure 1. First page of incomplete piano part for Version 1 of Moods (University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Special Collections, shelfmark MC988b Box 10, folder 3).

  
  

• Sometime in the early 1940s Price re-conceived it for the final scoring of flute, clarinet, and piano, and added a new movement between the original two movements; this version – Version 2 – may have been performed (although no documentation for such a performance has yet come to light).

Figure 2. Last page of incomplete flute part for Version 2 (University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Special Collections, shelfmark MC 988a Box 8, folder 2).

• In the mid-to-late 1940s Price replaced the middle movement with a completely different middle movement, revised the first and third movements, copied out the whole anew, and may have had this version (Version 3) performed in a chamber recital of the Lake View Musical Society on March 10, 1947. She inscribed the autograph score for this final version of the suite for Lillian Poenisch (1898-1981), a clarinetist and conductor, was a founding member of the Chicago Woman’s Symphony Orchestra. 

Figure 3. Inside front binder cover and first page of score of Version 3 (University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Special Collections, shelfmark MC 2676 Box 1, Item 1).

• At some point the manuscripts for Version 3 were separated from those for Versions 1 and 2. The latter – all of them incomplete – remained with Price and were found in the storied abandoned house in St. Anne in 2009, whence they came to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Libraries. The former made its way into an apartment in Chicago that was owned by clarinetist Casja Ilo and in 2023 acquired by Dr. Paul Kratoska, who subsequently donated them to the University Arkansas, Fayetteville, Libraries.

Figure 4. Apartment Building where final fair-copy autograph score and piano part for Moods was found in 2023.

Thus have the crucial autographs that transmit the final authorized version of Moods finally been reunited with the enormous trove of music manuscripts, letters, photographs, and other materials that collectively document the life and creative imagination of Florence B. Price, composer. Professor Bumpers and his students have already made rehearsal videos of the three movements, but today's performance was to my knowledge the first time n modern memory that the suite has been heard live. Let’s hope that more will follow!