Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
By Douglas Shadle
February 20, 2019
“While more and more blacks are being driven into homelessness,” a
classical music fan fumed, “Mostly Mozart is rewarded with government,
corporate, and media support.” The problem? No black composers on the
program—not even Mozart’s great contemporary, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier
de Saint-Georges.
We can easily imagine this critique as a sick Twitter burn from last
summer, or last week. Calls to diversify classical music programs
intensify regularly. But the sad truth is that many organizations are
reluctant to pursue any path other than business as usual. (Others
certainly aren’t.) Perhaps sadder still, the comment above dates from
1987. Mike Snell, a reader of Raoul Abdul’s music column in the New
York-based Amsterdam News, wrote Abdul to eviscerate the media
for not highlighting the systemic racism underpinning the lack of black
representation on the concert stage.
Plus ça change.
Returning to the present: the music of one black composer, Florence
B. Price, has experienced an extraordinary surge of public interest over
the past year, mainly on the heels of extensive coverage of violinist Er-Gene Kahng’s world premiere recording of her two violin concertos in The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Prominent U.S. orchestras, including the New Jersey Symphony, North
Carolina Symphony, and Minnesota Orchestra, programmed Price’s music
during their 2018–19 seasons. The Fort Smith Symphony Orchestra recently released the world premiere recording
of her Fourth Symphony on Naxos Records. And more ensembles will likely
take up the mantle, both in the United States and around the globe. The
Chicago Symphony, for example, recently announced that it would perform Price’s Third Symphony in the 2019–20 season.
Given the longstanding historical exclusion of African American
composers, Price’s sudden rise to stardom might raise a few eyebrows. Is
the sudden widespread interest in Price’s music a convenient fad? Are
predominantly white institutions exploiting her legacy for short-term
gain—what Nancy Leong has called “racial capitalism”? These are the right questions to ask. Their skeptical slant is justified when a major trade publication can obliviously describe women composers as “in vogue.” And it would be far from the first time that white musicians bolstered their careers on the musical labor of black women, or that black women’s musical accomplishments have faced unfair scrutiny upon entering white public consciousness.
We can only speculate about how Price’s resurgent presence on the
concert stage might bring about deeper structural changes over the long
term. But, if we listen carefully, her unique experiences as a composer
and as a black woman present us with a more immediate opportunity to
name and fight racial injustice today. Mike Snell’s complaints—and those
of concerned musicians before and after him—show that time has
refracted these injustices to the present.
Plus ça change, indeed.
Open Our Ears
The persistence of anti-black racism in classical music spaces stems
largely from the white majority’s refusal to engage meaningfully with
black voices—or even to listen. In a detailed critique of the new music communities
in which he has participated, composer Anthony R. Green encourages us
to “trust these voices. Be critical, but respectful. Engage in exchange.
Be patient. When our work is blatantly ignored, disrespected, not
studied, and not programmed, our voice is all we have.” White people,
even those with anti-racist sympathies, often recoil at the suggestion
that they have harmed people of color and shift the discussion to defend
their motivations—a phenomenon multicultural education expert Robin
DiAngelo calls “white fragility.” But the fact that Green’s observations are not new simply proves the point.
Green’s critiques revolve around the classical music industry’s
propensity to pigeonhole black composers as “one-trick ponies.” This
dehumanization, he argues, occurs when concert organizers think about
music by black composers only during Black History Month or, in more
recent years, for concerts with a social justice theme. “While this is
not necessarily negative,” he adds, “the injustice arises when absolute
music or music with non-social themes by black composers is overlooked.”
Florence Price’s daughter, Florence Robinson, expressed similar
frustrations after Price died in 1953. Artists were happy to perform
Price’s arrangements of Negro spirituals, but she found no advocates for
her mother’s symphonic compositions.
Once a black composer finds an advocate, however, another problem is
that concert organizers do not always think through the implications of
poor framing. Price’s Symphony in E Minor, which Frederick Stock and the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra famously premiered in June 1933, appeared on a program ostensibly devoted to celebrating black musical achievement.
It featured tenor Roland Hayes and pianist Margaret Bonds as soloists in
addition to pieces by Price and Afro-British composer Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor. But the opening number was an overture by John Powell,
an avowed anti-black eugenicist. Powell’s presence was an acute
indignity for Price and the other black performers, especially since
Chicago’s black newspaper, the Defender, had publicly criticized Powell earlier that year.
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