Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
is
profiled at AfriClassical.com,
which features a comprehensive Works List and a Bibliography by Prof.
Dominique-René de Lerma, www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.
A conductor who understands the challenges female musicians
of color face is leading the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra
performances this week of a work by a black woman composer who faced
similar obstacles during her lifetime.
Mei-Ann Chen chose as the centerpiece of her debut program on the CSO
subscription series "Mississippi River," an orchestral suite by
Florence Price that was entering the orchestra's repertory for the first
time. The performance, heard Thursday night at Symphony Center, was
accompanied by a proclamation from Mayor Rahm Emanuel marking the
official launch of the orchestra's ambitious multidisciplinary festival,
"Rivers: Nature. Power. Culture," which runs to June 9.
Price wasn't the only African-American composer honored during his or
her lifetime but posthumously neglected. But her obscurity is
particularly grievous, given the size and quality of her output, which
includes more than 300 compositions, ranging from symphonies, concertos
and chamber works to songs and spiritual arrangements. Apart from the
vocal pieces, most of her oeuvre remains unpublished and unknown.
History books credit Price with being the first black woman
in the U.S. to be recognized as a symphonic composer. Born in Little
Rock, Ark., she moved with her husband to Chicago during the late 1920s
and lived, studied and worked here until her death in 1953. She won
several composition awards for works such as her Symphony No. 1, which
the CSO premiered at the Century of Progress Exposition here in 1933. In
the years that followed, her fame spread as far as the British Isles,
where John Barbirolli commissioned and premiered a suite for strings she
wrote for his Halle Orchestra in Manchester.
But Price's folkish, conservative, tonal idiom was falling out of
fashion even before her death, despite the efforts of such major artists
as Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price to keep her songs and spiritual
arrangements before the public. Hats off, then, to Chen for reminding us
of a missing chapter in the classical musical life of the city.
The 30-minute "Mississippi River" dates from 1934 and is meant to
evoke feelings associated with a boat cruising down the river and the
folk music heard along its banks. Price incorporates her own
arrangements of such familiar spirituals as "Deep River" and "Nobody
Knows the Trouble I've Seen" along with original connective tissue. The
suite is attractive, tuneful, nostalgic, cannily scored, direct of
expression. Its unabashed populism recalls the folkish scores Virgil
Thomson provided for Pare Lorentz's documentary films "The Plow That
Broke the Plains" and "The River" in the late '30s.
Is a Florence Price renaissance upon us? I think not. Still, the very
fact that the CSO is rehabilitating a once-lauded name in Chicago music
is important — more so, in fact, than the score itself. Chen clearly
believes in the musical merits of "Mississippi River," and she succeeded
in transferring her admiration to the orchestra. Thursday's audience
responded warmly. It's good news that the Northwestern University
Chamber Orchestra will perform Price's First Symphony June 6 at
Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston.
...
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $31-$215; 312-294-3000, cso.org.
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