Dear Constant Reader, This blog will be used primarily to offer information and reflections pertinent to my ongoing series of editions of the music of Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds. Many posts may be extracted from the printed forewords of my published editions. These are intended to facilitate access to brief but, I hope, substantive notes about the very many pieces by these composers that are only now making their way out into the world in print. (G. Schirmer also prints these "programme notes" on their pages for the individual works.) Although we currently find ourselves in the midst of a Florence Price renaissance, almost all of the music I’ll be discussing is music that is discussed little or not at all in the burgeoning body of writings about Price and her creative life. My hope – audacious and humble at once – is simply to help get the conversation started about these wonderful pieces and what they tell us about Florence Price’s extraordinary journey, about her world and our own, perhaps even about ourselves.
Other posts may be reflections on events in my musical world, especially as these concern Price and Bonds, though I may occasionally muse on other topics as well. Warning: I am also an avid, if amateur, reader of poetry. Some of these posts may be as much about poetry as they are about music and musicians.
This is my first blog, Constant Reader, and there is certainly a learning curve. Thanks in advance for your patience with my inelegances and faux pas. Please reach out to me in whatever way you find most convenient and appealing.
With that, Constant Reader, my first blog post is below. Thanks for being here. – JMC 031920
Florence B. Price (1887-1953) achieved a level of renown that defied all expectations for an African American woman in her day.[1]Having studied at the New England Conservatory from 1903 to 1906, she pursued a career that included teaching at Shorter College (Little Rock) and heading the Music Department at Clark College (Atlanta). After moving to Chicago in 1927 to pursue a better, safer life than anything possible in the virulently racist U.S. South, she immersed herself that city’s bustling cultural and educational life, becoming actively involved with the National Association of Negro Musicians and studying music and a variety of subjects at American Conservatory, Chicago Teachers College, Central YMCA College, the Lewis Institute, and the University of Chicago.[2] Today she is celebrated as the first African American woman to have her music performed by a major U.S. orchestra (her First Symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as part of the World’s Fair in 1933), but her fame spread far beyond than that, and lasted much longer. The following two decades witnessed performances of her music by at least nine other orchestras, as well as by some of the world’s greatest soloists and chamber players. More than a decade after her death her reputation was still so great that the City of Chicago Public Schools named the Florence B. Price Elementary School after her in 1964. That school closed in 2012, but the same building still bears her name: the Florence B. Price Twenty-First Century Academy for Excellence.
And through it all she composed. Florence Beatrice Price penned hundreds of compositions of astonishing richness and breadth which gave voice to a musical imagination that would not be stilled despite the limitations that her world would have imposed on her because of her race and her sex. Her reputation has been steadily broadening in recent decades thanks to dedicated and brilliant scholarly work by Rae Linda Brown, Barbara Garvey Jackson, Eileen Southern, Helen Walker-Hill, Samantha Ege, and Douglas Schadle, among others.[3]
But if Price the composer never had to be rediscovered, the same could not be said of her music itself –simply because she published only a small portion of what she wrote. That began to change when her elder daughter, Florence Price Robinson (1917-75), donated a significant body of her music manuscripts and biographical materials to the University of Arkansas Libraries (Fayetteville), and the situation further improved with that library’s acquisition of a sizeable “addendum” in the late 1980s. Another major development was the discovery of a sizeable trove of music manuscripts and other documents in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009 – a recovery that eventually met with major media coverage. Florence Price, having already during her lifetime overcome the forcible silencing that was her lot as an African American and a woman in a profoundly racist and sexist world, was now in a position to have her voice heard again.
In November, 2018, G. Schirmer announced that it had acquired the exclusive international rights to Price's complete catalog. Since then Schirmer has made good on the responsibilities attendant to that announcement, releasing a steady stream of previously unknown compositions by this extraordinary composer. Those previously unknown works, even more than the ones that are already in circulation and currently fueling the Price Renaissance, are the ones that break the silence forced upon Price by the reluctance of her own world and her posthumous erasure from mainstream narratives of music's history. Florence Price speaks to us and our world now more than ever before -- and that is something to be celebrated.
[1] Although Price is mentioned in many texts that deal with African American composers and women in music, many of these sources repeat the same, rather basic information. The most detailed and authoritative biography currently available is the Introduction to the late Rae Linda Brown’s edition of Price’s First and Third Symphonies (“Lifting the Veil: The Symphonies of Florence B. Price,” in Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, ed. Rae Linda Brown and Wayne Shirley, Recent Researches in American Music, No. 66 [Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 2008], xv-lii). As of this writing there is still no book-length biography, but Brown’s drafted biography has been completed by Guthrie P. Ramsey, jr. and is due for release in June 2020 (Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, ed. Guthrie P. Ramsey, jr. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming]). [2] Brown, “Lifting the Veil,” xxiv. [3] See, for example, Barbara Garvey Jackson: “Florence Price, Composer,” The Black Perspective in Music 5 (1977), 30–43; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971; 3rd ed., 1997); Rae Linda Brown, “Selected Orchestral Music of Florence B. Price (1888 [sic] – 1953) in the Context of Her Life and Work (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987); Helen Walker-Hill, “Music by Black Women Composers at the American Music Research Center,” American Music Research Center Journal 2 (1992): 23-52; Calvert Johnson, “Florence Beatrice Price: Chicago Renaissance Woman,” The American Organist 34 (2000): 68-76; Scott David Farrah, “Signifyin(g): A Semiotic Analysis of Symphonic Works by William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson, and Florence B. Price” (Ph.D. diss, Florida State University, 2007); Samantha Ege, “Florence Price and the Politics of Her Existence,” The Kapralova Society Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-10; Douglas Shadle, “Plus ça change: Florence B. Price In The #Blacklivesmatter Era,” NewMusicBox 20 February 2019, New Music USA, accessed 21 September 2019, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/plus-ca-change-florence-b-price-in-the-blacklivesmatter-era/.
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