[Note: The following is extracted from my edition of "Clouds," but the piece has a more personal meaning for me than that edition could convey. I still recall the feeling -- probably best described as wonder or awe -- that came over me as I looked at the first of the two surviving autographs during my first day of work on the Price papers in the Special Collections Division of the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, in March 2018. Later that day I texted a photo of the manuscript to my friend and collaborator-in-Price Lara Downes, who immediately expressed her own fascination. At that point I had not yet figured out the work's symbolic importance -- a composition about the ultimate poetic symbol of freedom, penned by an African American woman in a profoundly racist and sexist world -- and I was only dimly aware of the work's wide-ranging stylistic freedom. I just knew that it looked like a gorgeous piece. About that much, at least, I was right.
Lara has since recorded "Clouds" in her series of Florence Price Piano Discoveries, and the edition came out with G. Schirmer in January. I believe this long-overlooked extraordinary piece is now beginning to get the attention it deserves.]
Clouds stands as one of the most important of Price’s hitherto unpublished works for piano solo – and in some ways one of her most problematic. Its importance derives partly from its scale – its length is comparable to that of the extant Fantasies nègres – and partly from the richness of its musical material. Although the work as a whole is unified by the recurrent scalar descent from dominant to tonic, and its associated rhythm, stated at the outset (mm. 1, 27ff., and elsewhere), its stylistic allusions range from a tender meditative style familiar to Price enthusiasts from works such as Memory Mist and Sketches in Sepia,[1]through intense lyricism reminiscent of the music of Clara and Robert Schumann (mm. 27-36) and turbulent minor-mode chromaticism evocative of Rachmaninoff or Scriabin (mm. 51-60), to post-impressionist idioms that recall Debussy and Ravel. With characteristically clever resourcefulness, Price uses the inherent instability of the post-tonal materials as transitions between tonally stable plateaus:
The importance of Clouds also derives from its engagement with the very freedom of expression that was crucial to mid-twentieth-century music generally, and to societal identity for African Americans and women in particular. Not only does this work bring together in a single coherent composition stylistic idioms that are rarely found together in a single piece, but it does so under the descriptive moniker of clouds, which in literature, poetry, and African American art in particular are one of the most potent and ubiquitous symbols of freedom – freedom of movement, freedom of shape and form, freedom of mood, freedom from virtually every restriction that binds humans and other objects. By integrating disparate musical styles, none of which bows to the prejudicial restrictions that Price’s world would have placed upon her because of her race and her sex, under a title so powerfully evocative of freedom, Price in Clouds asserts her ability to resist – to refuse to let her mind be segregated, her imagination stilled, her genius bowed by others’ expectations.
-- [written in December, 2019]
[1] Florence B. Price, Memory Mist (New York: G. Schirmer, 2019); Price, Sketches in Sepia (New York: G. Schirmer, 2020).
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