No one would ever confuse Florence Price’s In Sentimental Mood with Duke Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood.” The title of Price’s piece offers a glimpse of musical wit. For while Price’s piece is based on specific individual signature elements of Ellington’s tune, it treats those elements as motives and topics, creating an entirely new piece based on the original – not an arrangement, as one would expect if she had retained the indefinite article “a” in her own title. [1] Here’s a glimpse of two of the elements – the closely voiced chromatically inflected neighbor-tone chords and, most importantly, the melodic incipit (this is taken from the handout I used at a presentation for the American Musicological Society in Boston last November):
Price’s piece is thus a gloss or a trope – or, if you will, a concert-music mashup. Not only that, but it’s an absolutely beautiful and charming piece, one that shows the richness of Price’s harmonic imagination as well as her extraordinary gifts as melodist. Lara Downes’s world-premiere recording brings it all out with style and imagination.[2]
I explain it all in in the note below, which is adapted from my foreword to my edition of the piece for G. Schirmer. I hope you’ll enjoy this piece!
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In Sentimental Mood was first composed on September 22, 1947, but the sole surviving autograph shows that at some point after that Price returned to the work and made significant structural revisions. The work’s title makes clear the motivation behind its signature motive and most of its thematic material: Duke Ellington’s jazz classic “In a Sentimental Mood” (1935). The signature gesture of Ellington’s tune is an ascending gapped scale leading from the tonic to a longer note on the ninth above, which then returns to the upper tonic. Price uses these same signature gestures motivically for her titularly related piano composition In Sentimental Mood (no a): she begins every section with it, inverts it, tosses it about throughout the texture, and so on. Price’s work is also notable for its whimsical tonal structure: it begins and ends in E-flat major, but modulates abruptly to B major in m. 25, F major in m. 41, and G major in m. 57 before returning to the tonic E-flat; the harmonic progression in mm. 69-78 reveals Price’s genius for rich harmonic language without compromising the work’s lighthearted warmth. The fundamental characteristic materials of Price’s piece are the same as those of Ellington’s, and Price retains the melodic beauty and air of sentimental romance that motivates Ellington’s work. Yet Price, using the stuff of Ellington’s tune, creates a concertizing trope on Ellington’s idea – making an entirely new piece that would, and could, never be confused with it. In Sentimental Mood is a work by Price, not by Ellington – and in it she speaks in a voice that is distinctively and inimitably her own.
[1] The recording unfortunately inserts the indefinite article “a” into Price’s title, obscuring Price’s little game.
[2] Florence B. Price, Piano Discoveries: From the Heart (Three Roses, In Sentimental Mood, First Romance, Your Hands in Mine), performed by Lara Downes, Flipside Records FL0020 (2020).