SFChronicle.com: African American female composer finds a musical champion in Oakland

Florence B. Price (1887-1953)

The San Francisco Chronicle

Joshua Kosman

January 26, 2019

“If you don’t remember anything else from tonight,” music director Michael Morgan told the audience at the Paramount Theatre on Friday, Jan. 25, “remember Florence Price.”

In truth, there was plenty to take away from the concert by the Oakland Symphony, a lively and sometimes revelatory event devoted to music by black composers. Titled “To Belong Here: Notes From the African Diaspora,” the program ranged from 18th century Paris to the Harlem winningly evoked in the music of Duke Ellington.

But Morgan was entirely correct in focusing the audience’s attention on the music of Price, who died in 1953 and is only now — well into the following century — receiving some of the attention she’s due. Price’s Third Symphony, a robust and wondrously inventive creation that had its premiere in 1940 in Detroit and was promptly forgotten, emerged as the triumphal high point of the evening — not only a memorable performance in itself but a challenge to other orchestras and conductors who seem to believe that there’s no music worth programming by women or composers of color.

We are, happily, going through a little renaissance of interest in Price’s work. An unknown pile of her manuscripts was rediscovered a decade ago, and last year the music publisher G. Schirmer acquired the rights to her catalog, which means that her symphonies and concertos are only a phone call and a royalty payment away. A world premiere recording of Price’s Fourth Symphony, released this month by the Arkansas Fort Smith  Symphony and conductor John Jeter, revealed a work full of delicate harmonic and rhythmic surprises.

Yet to judge from Friday’s vibrant and resourceful performance, it may be the Third Symphony that provides the most compelling entree into Price’s distinctive orchestral sound world. Like its fellows, the piece is steeped in the harmonies and rhythms of the African American world — the fluid, gapped melodic scales of the spiritual, the vivid syncopated dance strains known as “juba,” even the densely stacked harmonies of big band jazz.

At a first encounter, this can make Price’s symphonies remind a modern listener of Dvorák, especially given the superficial similarities in their orchestral palettes. But where Dvorák is a tourist-ethnographer — mining and exploiting the sounds of the New World for his own European ends — Price turns those musical resources into something periodically new and strange.

In the Third Symphony, that means expanding a seeming straightforward set of melodic themes into a first movement of unpredictable but closely argued musical logic. It means a radiant and rhapsodic slow movement punctuated by plangent bassoon and trumpet solos, and an ebullient dance interlude that piles syncopation atop syncopation until the phrases stretch into wonderful, oddball shapes.

Perhaps most striking is the symphony’s finale, which turns the simple rhythmic profile of a buoyant rondo into something weightier and more shadowy — a bit of expressive sleight-of-hand that Morgan and the orchestra conveyed perfectly.