Pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege
urges music lovers to explore the wealth of repertoire by Black women
composers as she launches her new album of music by Florence Price for International Women’s Day
I had always assumed that ‘women didn’t compose back then’. I can’t tell you when or how this phrase was passed on to me, but there was certainly very little in my music education to suggest otherwise. All of this changed during my undergraduate exchange year at McGill University in Canada. I was introduced to Florence Price and Margaret Bonds in a course on early 20th-century music. Their names and works followed the previous week’s focus on Lili and Nadia Boulanger. The Boulanger sisters opened my eyes to a longer history of women in music. Price and Bonds, however, were a revelation: this was the first time I ever encountered women composers of African descent.
Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She pursued her passion for classical music at the New England Conservatory in 1903 and graduated three years later with two degrees: one in piano teaching and one in organ performance. She migrated to Chicago in 1927 and made history in 1933 as the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major national orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony No 1 in E minor.
Bonds (1913-1972) was born and raised in Chicago. Her mother, Estella, was deeply involved in musical life in the city and welcomed Price into Chicago’s Black classical scene. The young Margaret made history alongside Price in 1933 as she became the first Black female soloist to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Like Price, Bonds was a masterful pianist and prolific composer, and Bonds became one of the chief interpreters of Price’s piano works.
Fantasie Nègre No 1 in E minor was the first piece I ever heard by Price. She wrote it in 1929 and added the inscription, ‘To my talented little friend, Margaret A. Bonds.’ My album, Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, is named after Price’s fantasie genre. Fantasie Nègre translates as ‘Negro Fantasy’. ‘Negro’ pertains to the African heritage of Florence Price’s mixed cultural background, while ‘Fantasy’, as both a general and musical term, conveys the effusive outpouring of Price’s imagination onto the page. But its shades of meaning do not end there. Fantasie is German. Nègre is French. Price’s national voice is American and, at its heart, are the stories of the enslaved. For example, Fantasie Nègre No 1 is based on the spiritual, ‘Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass’, and the other fantasies (No 2 in G minor, No 3 in F minor and No 4 in B minor) strongly evoke Black American folk songs.
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