A TETRALOGY OF GOOD NEWS, COURTESY OF FLORENCE PRICE, MARGARET BONDS, AND FRIENDS (3): A Historic Four-Album Collection of Florence Price’s Piano Music

In the spring of 2023 Professor Kevin Wayne Bumpers of Miami Dade college and I were texting about the fact that much of today’s world is working with but little urgency to right the erasure of Florence Price and her legacies from her rightful position in musical life and music history. Progress has been made, but performers, scholars, and the public persist in implicitly but potently placing Price in a separate, lower tier than (e.g.) Mozart, Beethoven, and other canonical white Euro-American males.

To explain: virtually every note that those canonical composers wrote has been published, studied, taught, performed, and discussed in scholarly writing, and that work now provides the basis for a sort of meta-discourse as other performers and scholars interpret and respond to existing knowledge and earlier interpretations. The composers benefit from that. By  contrast, in the last decade or so we seem to have entered into a similar stage of meta-discourse where Florence Price is concerned – but even though more than eighty percent (70%) of Price’s piano oeuvre is now published, most people know only a handful of works and most of her piano oeuvre still languishes in obscurity, published but rarely taught, learned, performed, studied -- unknown despite its availability. As a result, the broad foundation that enables canonical composers to flourish is lacking where Price is concerned. And this has produced a paradoxical sort of mini-canon of Price’s music. The situation is better than what was available fifteen or twenty years ago, certainly, but it falls far short of what the richness and variety of her inexhaustible musical imagination deserves, indeed what it would have been long since afforded if she had been, y'know, white and male.

Anyway, that disparate reception of Beethoven and Price in performance and scholarship provided the occasion for this text from Professor Bumpers on April 10, 2023 (quoted by permission):

He does indeed.

Because in addition to learning Florence Price’s piano music almost as fast as scholars and publishers have brought it out and sharing many recordings on his YouTube channel, over the past several years Professor Bumpers has been preparing a four-album set of Price’s piano music categorized by genre and style. The set’s title is Florence Price: Piano Music, and it is by any measure the most thoughtful and comprehensive effort at righting the great wrong of the second-tiering of Florence Price that our world has yet seen.

            So that project is the subject of this third installment of good news brought by Florence Price and friends to a world that desperately needs such news. The first volume of Bumpers’s anthology, devoted to her piano arrangements of Negro spirituals, drops TOMORROW, July 4, 2026!  Titled Negro Spirituals for Piano Solo, it documents Price’s infinitely varied imagination in translating the solo and communal ancestral beauty of the spiritual into the language of the instrument that was dearest to her heart (the piano). Here are the works included (track order may change):

Those who know the spirituals know that the affective variety of these melodies themselves is very great. Price’s settings celebrate and augment that affective range, reaching deep into the emotional recesses of the traditional melodies and words and lending them that extraordinary balance of melodic beauty and emotional intensity that is one hallmark of her style. If the performances – most of them done in the intimacy of what appears to be a home setting – that I’ve heard on Prof. Bumpers’s YouTube channel are any indication, his performances on this album will give eloquent and unforgettable voice to Price’s inspirations.

            Florence Price: Negro Spirituals for Piano will be followed in August by a second album titled Rainbow Waltz: A Collection of Salon Pieces for Piano (24 tracks), then in the fall by Volume 3 (Southern Sketches; 24 tracks) and Volume 4 (In Sentimental Mood; approximately 20 tracks). The set as a whole thus offers approximately 79 tracks, most of them never before professionally recorded. That’s about thirty percent (30%) of Price’s entire surviving pianistic output – by far the largest sampling yet, and all of it thanks to one remarkable Price dévoté who has poured his heart and his formidable talent into sharing her legacy with a world that needs to know it. There's much more work to do, but Florence Price: Piano Works represents a vital stride toward the broader, firmer base that is essential if the Price movement is to continue and she is to claim the position in the history of the musical art that she so richly deserves.

Kevin Wayne Bumpers’s Florence Price: Piano Music will be available on all major streaming and distribution platforms. Here’s the Apple Music link, and here’s the DistroKid page.

            Now check back next week for the fourth and final installment of this tetralogy of glad tidings brought to you by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and friends!