Rediscovering Another Facet of Florence Price’s Musical Imagination
On July 6, 1949 Florence B. Price composed a short and brilliant piece for piano solo titled Whim Wham. The title refers to a caprice or something gotten or bought on a whim, and the earliest autograph suggests that Price may have considered it a complement to the serenity of her recently published and recorded jewel Placid Lake. (Here is Robin Arrigo’s beautiful home rendering of Placid Lake).
Then both pieces languished in obscurity for seventy-one years.
They remained in Price’s house in St. Anne, Illinois, for sixty years. Then, in 2009, they were acquired by the University of Arkansas Libraries (Fayetteville). Then they languished in obscurity in Fayetteville, hiding in plain sight, for eleven years. Scholars didn’t look at them, journalists didn’t write about them, performers didn’t play them, audiences didn’t hear them.
And students didn’t learn them.
Then, in 2020, G. Schirmer published them.
Now, seventy-one years later, they’re being rediscovered, along with 90%+ of Price’s other compositional output. In fact, Whim Wham has now been recorded not once, but twice. You’ve already seen Robin Arrigo’s recording of Placid Lake, and here’s her recording of Whim Wham. Put the two pieces alongside one another and you’ll get a tantalizing glimpse into the workings of Florence Price’s unstoppable musical imagination.
But now there is another recording of the newly unearthed Whim Wham – this one a music video by a superb international team based in Antwerp, featuring pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers, videographer Andrew Richards (himself also a superb and sought-after operatic tenor), and bass-baritone Justin Hopkins. The video is part of a series of videos featuring unknown works by Price and Margaret Bonds that our team is offering under the title Songs of Comfort (#SongsOfComfort), a hard-won gift born of the crisis and malaise that have resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown and the heightened awareness of systemic racism and police brutality that have been two defining features of the scar tissue of the year 2020. (To learn more about the series, see here.) Here is Jeanne-Minette’s fabulous and fun rendering of Whim Wham:
The points, of course, are several. One – perhaps the most obvious – is that even though there’s been a significant surge in public and scholarly interest in Florence Price and her music in recent years, there is still a great deal of work to be done in terms of un-silencing her musical voice: the ten or twelve pieces that have fueled the Price renaissance so far will not do it because they leave pieces like Placid Lake and Whim Wham to languish in the same silence that has enveloped them for the past seventy-one years. That in turn would perpetuate the forcible silencing of Price’s musical voice that was the goal and the effect of her racist world. If today’s world contents itself with the music that’s already been accessible for years, who knows what joys and wonders we’ll miss because they’re just sitting there not being performed, heard, or taught to younger musicians?
Who knows how many other Whim Whams there are?
But there’s another point as well, and this one concerns Price. Latter-day discussions of her life and her music are often Deadly Serious, focusing on the immense personal and professional obstacles she surmounted in the course of her career and singling out her large and “serious” works – the three surviving symphonies, the concertos, the Fantasies nègres, other big pieces. I’m guilty of this, and I’m not the only one. And while those insights are valuable – essential – they’re only part of the picture.
The other part of the picture is what we see in Placid Lake and Whim Wham: Florence Price as a composer whose musical imagination does not just celebrate tranquility, but also finds delight and irrepressible joy in caprice, in spontaneity and whimsy. If we want to understand Price more fully than has been possible while these hundreds of compositions have lain silent and unheard in the archives, then we need to integrate this facet of her musical imagination into our view of who she was and what she was about.
2020 has been dominated by crisis and malaise, by hate, illness, and violence. Now, let’s take a lesson from Price: let's let our imagination embrace the joys of whimsical spontaneity. Listen to a composition written in 1949 that addresses itself to us in 2020: Florence Price’s Whim Wham.