Notes on the Recently Unearthed Cotton Dance (ca. 1940)
Florence B. Price’s brilliance as composer resided partly in her refusal to let her imagination be limited by others’ preconceptions of what her music should be based on her race and her sex. In some works, her stratagem for confronting those prejudices amounted to starting out by accommodating them, only to turn the tables and challenge them boldly later on.
The recently unearthed Cotton Dance that was originally titled simply “Presto” is one such work. In it, the Chicago-based Price applies a title that exoticizes the South that she and her family had left behind several years earlier and uses a main theme that recalls the well-known plantation song Shortnin’ Bread – conforming to what prejudiced Whites thought Southern Blacks “ought to” write. (That tune itself was used to decidedly racist ends in the mid-twentieth century.) The lively, syncopated rhythms (for example, at 0’35” and 2’05”) and the wonderful boogie-woogie bass in the left-hand at 1’19” play the same game. But the difficulty of the work’s rapid, closely voiced repeated-note chords, the difficult harmonic moves (check out 0’53” to 1’03”!), and especially the dissonant whole-tone passage at 2’50” are modernist through and through – worlds away from what anyone would expect from the humble title Cotton Dance.[1]
This newly published Cotton Dance pits stereotypical musical Blackness and Whiteness against each other in ways that would both gratify and confound those who would limit Florence B. Price’s musical identity on the basis of her race and her sex. By the end, despite its unassuming title and allusions to vernacular repertoires, “Cotton Dance” means something much different than it did at the outset: it now denotes an exercise of the very freedom of expression that was, by custom and by law, denied to women and African Americans in the 1940s – and with that the indomitable Florence Price has said her piece.
Works such as this Cotton Dance thus underscore the imperative for the ongoing Price renaissance to cast the net beyond the narrow pale of the dozen or so works that have fueled it so far – for they are crucial if we want a fresh view of the extraordinary Florence B Price, if we want to understand her not via stereotypes or comfortable assimilationist platitudes, but rather on her own terms – as a composer who refused to let her musical imagination be defined selectively.
(There's also more than a little humor about this piece, and it veritably sparkles!)
My longtime friend and colleague Robin Arrigo has recorded the Cotton Dance for me – and you’d never know it, but she did this in-home and on short notice. My thanks Robin for her willingness to transform these written notes, hidden in plain sight for more than half a century, into sound, letting us hear the fruits of the remarkable Florence Price’s extraordinary and unstoppable musical imagination. Give it a listen, and enjoy!
[Below is an excerpt from the foreword to my edition of the Cotton Dance (Presto) for G. Schirmer:]
The date of the Cotton Dance is unknown, but the handwriting in the two autographs is consistent with Price’s script from late 1930s and 1940s – less fine and spidery than is found in the works of the late 1920s and early 1930s but steadier and less blocklike than her script in the last five or six years of her life. The work thus belongs to a sizable corpus of compositions that reflect back musically on the South that Price left behind in 1927, never to return except on occasional visits. The earlier of the two autographs (source AS 2, below) is titled simply “Presto,” but when Price prepared a fair copy she retitled the work “Cotton Dance,” retaining “presto” as the tempo designation. In addition to the obvious difficulties presented by the nearly pervasive rapid repeated-note dense chords, the tricky syncopations (e.g., mm. 37-43 and 80-81 in the left hand), and the stamina required to shape the work’s dense rhythms dynamically, the work is remarkable for its relatively compact juxtaposing of widely different compositional styles and influences. On the one hand, the well-known African American plantation song “Shortnin’ Bread” is never far in the surface of the main theme itself, and is emphasized in the passages where Price gives accented descending eighth notes (e.g., mm. 38, 40, etc.); that tune, first documented in the 1890s, was enjoying newfound popularity in its rendition by The Andrews Sisters in 1938, around the time of this piece’s composition. That tune is stylistically consistent with the Cotton Dance’s other references to vernacular repertoires such as the obvious Boogie Woogie accompaniment in mm. 47-50. But those vernacular references are ensconced in a rondo-like structure that reveals not only Price’s advanced harmonic technique (for example, the difficult modulation from G major to D-flat major in mm. 28-33), its bold tonal design, and most obviously the dissonant section with the two hands running in parallel sevenths and ninths in chord planing of augmented triads (mm. 114-26). The latter passage in particular displays the compositional audacity of Price’s musical imagination – for surely the stylistic connotations of a title such as “Cotton Dance” do not lead one to expect extended passages of dissonance and whole-tone chord planing, and those compositional techniques also fall far beyond the pale of the generally conservative musical training she received. In this sense, the Cotton Dance is testimony to the power of Price’s determination, despite her race and sex (or perhaps because of them), to exercise the same freedom of expression that was one of the most potent driving forces of twentieth-century music – and, for that matter, of Blacks and Women generally.
[1] Indeed, the “Dance of the Cotton Blossoms” (1938) is sometimes called “Cotton Dance” – but it is a different piece (and one that does more readily conform to the expectations that its title suggests).