Price’s Second Violin Concerto explores unstable harmonic terrain.
Illustration by Paul Rogers
Sergio Mims forwards this article:
n
2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing
to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. The structure
was in poor condition: vandals had ransacked it, and a fallen tree had
torn a hole in the roof. In a part of the house that had remained dry,
the Gatwoods made a curious discovery: piles of musical manuscripts,
books, personal papers, and other documents. The name that kept
appearing in the materials was that of Florence Price. The Gatwoods
looked her up on the Internet, and found that she was a moderately
well-known composer, based in Chicago, who had died in 1953. The
dilapidated house had once been her summer home. The couple got in touch
with librarians at the University of Arkansas, which already had some
of Price’s papers. Archivists realized, with excitement, that the
collection contained dozens of Price scores that had been thought lost.
Two of these pieces, the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, have recently
been recorded by the Albany label: the soloist is Er-Gene Kahng, who is
based at the University of Arkansas.
The
reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find.
In a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced
herself thus: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two
handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro
blood in my veins.” She plainly saw these factors as obstacles to her
career, because she then spoke of Koussevitzky “knowing the worst.”
Indeed, she had a difficult time making headway in a culture that
defined composers as white, male, and dead. One prominent conductor took
up her cause—Frederick Stock, the German-born music director of the
Chicago Symphony—but most others ignored her, Koussevitzky included.
Only in the past couple of decades have Price’s major works begun to
receive recordings and performances, and these are still infrequent.
The
musicologist Douglas Shadle, who has documented the vagaries of Price’s
career, describes her reputation as “spectral.” She is widely cited as
one of the first African-American classical composers to win national
attention, and she was unquestionably the first black woman to be so
recognized. Yet she is mentioned more often than she is heard. Shadle
points out that the classical canon is rooted in “conscious selection
performed by individuals in positions of power.” Not only did Price fail
to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close
to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of
how a country can forget its cultural history.
Price
was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and grew up in a
middle-class household. She returned home after attending the New
England Conservatory, one of the few conservatories that admitted
African-Americans at the time. Her early adulthood was devoted largely
to teaching and to raising a family. Life in Arkansas was oppressive;
lynchings were routine. In 1927, Price moved with her family to Chicago,
where her horizons began to expand. She divorced her husband, who had
become abusive, and struck out on her own. Until then, her compositional
output had consisted mostly of songs, short pieces, and music for
children. She increasingly essayed larger symphonic and concerto forms,
winning support from Stock, a conductor of rare broad-mindedness.
Beginning
in 1931, Price wrote or sketched a total of four symphonies. The First
and the Third have been published by A-R Editions, under the scholarly
guidance of the late Rae Linda Brown, and recorded by the New Black
Music Repertory Ensemble and the Women’s Philharmonic, respectively. The
Second was apparently never finished; the Fourth, whose score turned up
in the St. Anne house, will receive its première by the Fort Smith
Symphony, in Arkansas, in May.
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