A FLORENCE PRICE PREMIERE, MARGARET BONDS, AND A SELF-CORRECTION

This post is a short one, but I hope you’ll find it interesting.

In an earlier post I remarked that Florence Price had submitted all four of her Fantasies nègres for piano solo to the 1932 Wanamaker competition – the competition in which the first version of her Fourth (B-minor) Fantasie nègre won honorable mention. That statement was incorrect.

In fact, Price submitted only the Second, Third, and Fourth Fantasies nègres to that competition. This we can say with confidence because the upper right-hand corners of the first pages of those fantasies’ autographs bear pencil numbering not in Price’s handwriting – apparently a mark introduced by the competition staff and/or judges to number the submissions. Here’s that portion of the first page of the autograph for the G-minor Fantasie nègre:

So why didn’t Price submit the First (E-minor) Fantasie nègre along with the other three?

Essentially, because she couldn’t: that work had already been publicly performed, and won a measure of national recognition, two years earlier. The pianist: Margaret Bonds. Here’s Carl Diton’s notice from The Pittsburgh Courier (6 September, 1930):

The autograph that was probably used for that 1930 Price premiere differs appreciably from the later one now found in the Special Collections division of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. It’s uncatalogued, but held in the Dominique-René de Lerma Collection in the Center for Black Music Research Collection at Columbia College, Chicago. I saw it in 2019 (and yes, it’s titled Negro Fantasy [no initial “A”], rather than Fantasie nègre). The differences between the early and later versions of this important piece are a desideratum of future Price research.

But this is also important because that 1930 performance took place at a national NANM meeting and was reported in one of the U.S.’s most widely circulated Black newspapers. The premiere of the E-minor Fantasie nègre thus represents a measure of national recognition for Price and should be regarded as an important moment in the growth of her renown as a composer. [1]

Finally, this performance – together with Price’s Five Preludes for Piano and Three Miniature Portraits of Uncle Ned and Bonds’s still-unpublished West Coast Blues – offers another insight into the artistic relationship between Bonds and Price. When Bonds premiered the Fantasie nègre [No. 1] on 3 September 1930, she was just seventeen years old and still a student at Parker High School on the south side of Chicago. She had enrolled at Northwestern University in 1929 as a student of Emily Boettcher Bogue (1907-1992) – but this nationally noted premiere was an important feather in her cap. (I talk a bit about Bonds as pianist here. While I have you on the line, let me also note that I know of few seventeen-year old pianists who could handle this difficult piece with the skill that Bonds apparently did.)

Readers of this post know that the E-minor Fantasie nègre that Bonds performed on that Wednesday evening was edited by Helen Walker-Hill and published by Hildegard Publishing Company in 1993, as part of that firm’s important volume titled Black Women Composers: A Century of Piano Music (1893-1990). The work is now widely performed and recorded, one of Price’s best-known works. But the 1930 premiere is – aside from the Hildegard volume, which includes Bonds’s Troubled Water as well as Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 1 – another important early, and very public, intersection of those two remarkable creative lives and personalities.

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[1] Rae Linda Brown states that “In the late 1920s and early 1930s . . . . [Price] held a variety of offices and her music was championed and performed regularly by esteemed artists, including organist Orrin Clayton Suthern II and pianist/composer Margaret Bonds, all of whom were associated with the organization [NANM].” The 1930 performance at the twelfth NANM convention presumably is included in this statement. See Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman, ed. Guthrie P. Ramsey jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 96-97.