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Symphony No. 1 in E Minor
FLORENCE PRICE

FLORENCE PRICE

Born April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas
Died June 3, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois

Symphony No. 1 in E Minor

  1. Allegro ma non troppo (18’)
  2. Largo, maestoso (13’)
  3. Juba Dance (4’)
  4. Finale (5’)

First performance by the Wichita Symphony.

 

One of a group of Black symphonists, and the only female among them, of the mid-20th century, Florence Price is only now becoming appreciated for the original artist that she was. Born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, her father was the only Black dentist in the city, and her mother a music teacher.

Florence began music lessons early, showed promise, and participated in her first recital at the age of four. At 14, she graduated high school as valedictorian. She enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied piano, organ, and composition with George Chadwick, Frederick Converse, and others. They were primarily post-19th century followers of Antonin Dvořák and traditional European classical teaching in music.

Following graduation in 1906, her career took her to Atlanta, where she became Chair of the Music Department of what is now known as Clark Atlantic University, a historically black research university. She met and married Thomas Price, a lawyer, in 1912, returning to Little Rock, where she taught music. The family moved to Chicago in 1927 as part of the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow segregation policies in the South.

In Chicago, she continued musical studies with teachers like Carl Busch and Leo Sowerby. Her compositional ambitions expanded from what had previously been primarily songs and teaching pieces. Beginning in 1931, she composed for orchestra and in 1932 completed her First Symphony, which she entered into a Wanamaker Foundation sponsored contest for Black composers. She won a First Prize of $500 in addition to a prize for her Piano Sonata.

The Chicago Symphony, under the direction of its Music Director Frederick Stock (1872 – 1942), performed the First Symphony in 1933, earning Price the historical recognition of being the first female Black composer to be performed by a major American orchestra. More on this performance shortly.

Price remained active in Chicago musical circles until she died in 1953. She became a prolific composer with four symphonies, three concertos, two string quartets, two piano quintets, and many works for piano, solo voice, and chorus. Marian Anderson sang Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in De Lord” at her famous Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939. The Michigan WPA Orchestra gave the premiere of Price’s Third Symphony in Detroit in 1940 with Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance. Conductor Sir John Barbirolli commissioned Price for a concert overture, which he performed with his Hallé Orchestra in England in 1951. The overture is now lost.

Despite her accomplishments, Price and her music faded into obscurity. In 1943, she reached out to Serge Koussevitzky, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, to promote her music. She was aware of her obstacles in writing, “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with, I have two handicaps – those of sex and race.” She never received a reply.

Posthumously, Price’s music was performed on occasion. The San Francisco’s Women’s Philharmonic programmed several works in the 1980s and subsequently recorded them. Prominent American music histories of the 20th century barely acknowledged Price, if at all, and usually in a single sentence linking her to other Black composers like William Dawson and William Grant Still.

The recent revival of Price’s music originated in a Chicago suburb in 2009 when a trove of manuscripts was discovered in a neglected, abandoned, and ransacked home that had once been Price’s summer residence. Two violin concertos and over a dozen other works long thought lost were among the papers strewn about a room. In 2018, G. Schirmer acquired the publication rights to Price’s entire output. Performances of her music now appear regularly at recitals and major symphony orchestras.

Before looking closer at the First Symphony, let’s return to that Chicago Symphony concert of June 15, 1933. For years, about all that we knew was that it was the first time a major American orchestra performed a symphony by a female Black American composer. This historical fact lends credit on the surface to the Chicago Symphony and its Music Director Frederick Stock’s “progressive and enlightened” efforts. But, as we learn from research published online in 2021 by John Michael Cooper, a musicologist and editor for much of Price’s music for G. Schirmer, there was more to the story.

The concert was part of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair. This very successful fair surpassed Chicago’s great Columbian Exposition of 1893, attracting over 39 million visitors during the heart of the Great Depression, and ran from May 29, 1933, until October 31, 1934. The fair marginalized Black culture and charged a fifty-cent admission prohibiting the ability of most Black residents to attend. The Chicago Symphony’s single tribute to Black artists, performed by an all-white, male orchestra led by a German-born conductor, was an exception during the fair that included exhibits and performances from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The concert premiered Price’s Symphony and featured performances by leading Black musicians. Tenor Roland Hayes (1887 – 1977) sang arias by Berlioz and Coleridge-Taylor, and a couple of spirituals arranged by Dvořák’s prodigy Harry T. Burleigh. The young pianist and eventual composer Margaret Bonds (1913 – 1972) played John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra. There was also a work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose music we encountered earlier this season at the Wichita Symphony and who in 1933 was still popular posthumously.

But on this program auspiciously honoring Black artistry, Stock’s selection of the opening work strikes us with disbelief. He programmed John Powell’s “Overture – In Old Virginia,” a work that concludes with a fully orchestrated rendition of “Dixie!” Powell (1882 - 1963) was a well-known pianist, composer, and ethnomusicologist in his day, but he was also known as an avowed white supremacist and eugenist. It is difficult to recognize Powell’s inclusion on this program as anything other than racist and an insult to the talents of the participating Black artists!

According to Dr. Cooper’s research, Maude Roberts George (1888 – 1943) deserves credit for underwriting the premiere of Price’s Symphony. George, a leader of Chicago’s Black Renaissance, paid $250 (about $5,000 in today’s money) for the Chicago Symphony to perform the Symphony. Maestro Stock accepted the donation and programmed the Symphony along with the unfortunate and insensitive inclusion of Powell’s Overture. Without George’s support, there are no assurances that the Chicago Symphony would have performed Price’s work.

Judging from a critic’s review of the concert, Price’s Symphony was a success. The Chicago Daily News reported, “It is a faultless work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion…worthy of a place in the symphonic repertoire.”

Price’s First Symphony is a new work for all of us, and the recent recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra increases its accessibility to a new public. Listeners familiar with Dvořák’s New World Symphony will note the influence of that work composed in 1893 while Dvořák was living in the United States. At the time, Dvořák predicted that the future of classical music in America would emerge from the source material of spirituals, or “sorrow songs.” Forty years later, Price’s Symphony reflects backward on that prophecy, using the New World Symphony as a point of departure. The two works share the same key signature of E minor, and Price models her large-scale structure on Dvořák’s work.

The first movement, marked Allegro ma non troppo (fast, but not too much), begins with a syncopated bassoon solo. A horn joins in on the tune’s repeat while oboes and clarinets introduce a counter melody. Listen for these rhythmic elements: the syncopated bassoon’s melody that introduces a short-long-short long-long motive and a quicker short-short-long rhythmic snap. Both rhythmic motives will be featured as Price develops her ideas similar to 19th-century techniques.

After building up energy, the music subsides into a relaxed second theme introduced by the horn and repeated by the oboe. Price demonstrates sensitivity to instrumental color throughout the movement as she frequently exchanges one color for another and gives prominent solos to many instruments. The structure of the movement is a classic sonata-allegro form common in large-scale compositions since the 18th century.

The second movement (slow and majestic) evokes a Sunday church service. A hymn for the entire brass ensemble accompanied by an African drum and answered by a supplicant solo clarinet creates a mood of great beauty. The strings are silent throughout this opening hymn. A slightly faster, contrasting section brings the strings into play, followed by a return of the brass hymn. Price’s use of tone color contrasts of the different instrumental families is striking. Rapid passagework that runs across the string section poses tricky ensemble problems. The return of the brass hymn, accompanied by a running clarinet passage and punctuated by “cathedral” chimes, is particularly imaginative, as well as challenging for the paired clarinets. The full orchestra plays a final reiteration of the hymn. Then in a spatial moment reminiscent of Charles Ives, the music fades away as if into the distance.

Just as Dvořák would have borrowed from Czech dances, so, too, does Florence Price acknowledge her African-American roots with a Juba Dance. Her third movement takes us to the music hall with a dance introduced into the American South by enslaved West Africans. Since drums were banned during the antebellum years, dancers stomped, slapped, and patted their bodies to create percussive effects. Price captures the rollicking good times of a party with violin fiddling and a boisterous ragtime dance with an ear-catching good tune by the brass. Drums, cymbals, and even a wind whistle contribute to the colorful music.

The fourth movement is marked “Finale” with a tempo marking of “presto” (very fast). It begins with a fleet, perpetual motion passagework with violins, flutes, and oboes in unison accompanied by chords from the rest of the orchestra. It’s reminiscent of a tarantella dance. A contrasting middle section with pizzicato strings introduces a jaunty tune by the clarinets, taken up in turn by a horn, trumpet, flute, and oboe. The opening tarantella returns with increasingly difficult passages. Internet chatter by violinists laments the challenges of the figurations, which might lie comfortably under the hands of a pianist, which Price was, but are treacherous for string players. Assuming everyone makes it through these “rapids,” the music only becomes faster in a frenzied dash to the finish.

The Symphony No. 1 orchestration requires two piccolos, two flutes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba timpani, percussion, and strings. The orchestration would have been typical for Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, except for Price’s African drums.

 

Notes by Don Reinhold © 2022

 

WSU SOM 2
Symphony No. 1 in E Minor
FLORENCE PRICE

FLORENCE PRICE

Born April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas
Died June 3, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois

Symphony No. 1 in E Minor

  1. Allegro ma non troppo (18’)
  2. Largo, maestoso (13’)
  3. Juba Dance (4’)
  4. Finale (5’)

First performance by the Wichita Symphony.

 

One of a group of Black symphonists, and the only female among them, of the mid-20th century, Florence Price is only now becoming appreciated for the original artist that she was. Born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, her father was the only Black dentist in the city, and her mother a music teacher.

Florence began music lessons early, showed promise, and participated in her first recital at the age of four. At 14, she graduated high school as valedictorian. She enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied piano, organ, and composition with George Chadwick, Frederick Converse, and others. They were primarily post-19th century followers of Antonin Dvořák and traditional European classical teaching in music.

Following graduation in 1906, her career took her to Atlanta, where she became Chair of the Music Department of what is now known as Clark Atlantic University, a historically black research university. She met and married Thomas Price, a lawyer, in 1912, returning to Little Rock, where she taught music. The family moved to Chicago in 1927 as part of the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow segregation policies in the South.

In Chicago, she continued musical studies with teachers like Carl Busch and Leo Sowerby. Her compositional ambitions expanded from what had previously been primarily songs and teaching pieces. Beginning in 1931, she composed for orchestra and in 1932 completed her First Symphony, which she entered into a Wanamaker Foundation sponsored contest for Black composers. She won a First Prize of $500 in addition to a prize for her Piano Sonata.

The Chicago Symphony, under the direction of its Music Director Frederick Stock (1872 – 1942), performed the First Symphony in 1933, earning Price the historical recognition of being the first female Black composer to be performed by a major American orchestra. More on this performance shortly.

Price remained active in Chicago musical circles until she died in 1953. She became a prolific composer with four symphonies, three concertos, two string quartets, two piano quintets, and many works for piano, solo voice, and chorus. Marian Anderson sang Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in De Lord” at her famous Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939. The Michigan WPA Orchestra gave the premiere of Price’s Third Symphony in Detroit in 1940 with Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance. Conductor Sir John Barbirolli commissioned Price for a concert overture, which he performed with his Hallé Orchestra in England in 1951. The overture is now lost.

Despite her accomplishments, Price and her music faded into obscurity. In 1943, she reached out to Serge Koussevitzky, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, to promote her music. She was aware of her obstacles in writing, “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with, I have two handicaps – those of sex and race.” She never received a reply.

Posthumously, Price’s music was performed on occasion. The San Francisco’s Women’s Philharmonic programmed several works in the 1980s and subsequently recorded them. Prominent American music histories of the 20th century barely acknowledged Price, if at all, and usually in a single sentence linking her to other Black composers like William Dawson and William Grant Still.

The recent revival of Price’s music originated in a Chicago suburb in 2009 when a trove of manuscripts was discovered in a neglected, abandoned, and ransacked home that had once been Price’s summer residence. Two violin concertos and over a dozen other works long thought lost were among the papers strewn about a room. In 2018, G. Schirmer acquired the publication rights to Price’s entire output. Performances of her music now appear regularly at recitals and major symphony orchestras.

Before looking closer at the First Symphony, let’s return to that Chicago Symphony concert of June 15, 1933. For years, about all that we knew was that it was the first time a major American orchestra performed a symphony by a female Black American composer. This historical fact lends credit on the surface to the Chicago Symphony and its Music Director Frederick Stock’s “progressive and enlightened” efforts. But, as we learn from research published online in 2021 by John Michael Cooper, a musicologist and editor for much of Price’s music for G. Schirmer, there was more to the story.

The concert was part of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair. This very successful fair surpassed Chicago’s great Columbian Exposition of 1893, attracting over 39 million visitors during the heart of the Great Depression, and ran from May 29, 1933, until October 31, 1934. The fair marginalized Black culture and charged a fifty-cent admission prohibiting the ability of most Black residents to attend. The Chicago Symphony’s single tribute to Black artists, performed by an all-white, male orchestra led by a German-born conductor, was an exception during the fair that included exhibits and performances from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The concert premiered Price’s Symphony and featured performances by leading Black musicians. Tenor Roland Hayes (1887 – 1977) sang arias by Berlioz and Coleridge-Taylor, and a couple of spirituals arranged by Dvořák’s prodigy Harry T. Burleigh. The young pianist and eventual composer Margaret Bonds (1913 – 1972) played John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra. There was also a work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose music we encountered earlier this season at the Wichita Symphony and who in 1933 was still popular posthumously.

But on this program auspiciously honoring Black artistry, Stock’s selection of the opening work strikes us with disbelief. He programmed John Powell’s “Overture – In Old Virginia,” a work that concludes with a fully orchestrated rendition of “Dixie!” Powell (1882 - 1963) was a well-known pianist, composer, and ethnomusicologist in his day, but he was also known as an avowed white supremacist and eugenist. It is difficult to recognize Powell’s inclusion on this program as anything other than racist and an insult to the talents of the participating Black artists!

According to Dr. Cooper’s research, Maude Roberts George (1888 – 1943) deserves credit for underwriting the premiere of Price’s Symphony. George, a leader of Chicago’s Black Renaissance, paid $250 (about $5,000 in today’s money) for the Chicago Symphony to perform the Symphony. Maestro Stock accepted the donation and programmed the Symphony along with the unfortunate and insensitive inclusion of Powell’s Overture. Without George’s support, there are no assurances that the Chicago Symphony would have performed Price’s work.

Judging from a critic’s review of the concert, Price’s Symphony was a success. The Chicago Daily News reported, “It is a faultless work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion…worthy of a place in the symphonic repertoire.”

Price’s First Symphony is a new work for all of us, and the recent recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra increases its accessibility to a new public. Listeners familiar with Dvořák’s New World Symphony will note the influence of that work composed in 1893 while Dvořák was living in the United States. At the time, Dvořák predicted that the future of classical music in America would emerge from the source material of spirituals, or “sorrow songs.” Forty years later, Price’s Symphony reflects backward on that prophecy, using the New World Symphony as a point of departure. The two works share the same key signature of E minor, and Price models her large-scale structure on Dvořák’s work.

The first movement, marked Allegro ma non troppo (fast, but not too much), begins with a syncopated bassoon solo. A horn joins in on the tune’s repeat while oboes and clarinets introduce a counter melody. Listen for these rhythmic elements: the syncopated bassoon’s melody that introduces a short-long-short long-long motive and a quicker short-short-long rhythmic snap. Both rhythmic motives will be featured as Price develops her ideas similar to 19th-century techniques.

After building up energy, the music subsides into a relaxed second theme introduced by the horn and repeated by the oboe. Price demonstrates sensitivity to instrumental color throughout the movement as she frequently exchanges one color for another and gives prominent solos to many instruments. The structure of the movement is a classic sonata-allegro form common in large-scale compositions since the 18th century.

The second movement (slow and majestic) evokes a Sunday church service. A hymn for the entire brass ensemble accompanied by an African drum and answered by a supplicant solo clarinet creates a mood of great beauty. The strings are silent throughout this opening hymn. A slightly faster, contrasting section brings the strings into play, followed by a return of the brass hymn. Price’s use of tone color contrasts of the different instrumental families is striking. Rapid passagework that runs across the string section poses tricky ensemble problems. The return of the brass hymn, accompanied by a running clarinet passage and punctuated by “cathedral” chimes, is particularly imaginative, as well as challenging for the paired clarinets. The full orchestra plays a final reiteration of the hymn. Then in a spatial moment reminiscent of Charles Ives, the music fades away as if into the distance.

Just as Dvořák would have borrowed from Czech dances, so, too, does Florence Price acknowledge her African-American roots with a Juba Dance. Her third movement takes us to the music hall with a dance introduced into the American South by enslaved West Africans. Since drums were banned during the antebellum years, dancers stomped, slapped, and patted their bodies to create percussive effects. Price captures the rollicking good times of a party with violin fiddling and a boisterous ragtime dance with an ear-catching good tune by the brass. Drums, cymbals, and even a wind whistle contribute to the colorful music.

The fourth movement is marked “Finale” with a tempo marking of “presto” (very fast). It begins with a fleet, perpetual motion passagework with violins, flutes, and oboes in unison accompanied by chords from the rest of the orchestra. It’s reminiscent of a tarantella dance. A contrasting middle section with pizzicato strings introduces a jaunty tune by the clarinets, taken up in turn by a horn, trumpet, flute, and oboe. The opening tarantella returns with increasingly difficult passages. Internet chatter by violinists laments the challenges of the figurations, which might lie comfortably under the hands of a pianist, which Price was, but are treacherous for string players. Assuming everyone makes it through these “rapids,” the music only becomes faster in a frenzied dash to the finish.

The Symphony No. 1 orchestration requires two piccolos, two flutes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba timpani, percussion, and strings. The orchestration would have been typical for Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, except for Price’s African drums.

 

Notes by Don Reinhold © 2022

 

WSU SOM 2