Through
much of musical history, women and African Americans have
been about as welcome among the fraternity of classical
composers as they have been in the average Southern country
club, which makes Florence Price all the more astounding.
She was the first U.S. composer to break the dual barrier
of race and gender, composing about three hundred elegant
classical works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus,
solo voice, piano, and organ, mostly in the 1930s and
1940s. Now, The Women's Philharmonic, a plucky, 20-year-old
orchestra based in San Francisco, has recorded three of
Price's most beguiling orchestral works, revealing that
her warm, vigorous music holds far more than merely historical
significance. Born
in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, Florence Beatrice
Smith began her musical studies with her mother, an
accomplished soprano and pianist. In 1903, she entered
the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where
she studied with George W. Chadwick, leader of the second
New England School of classical composers. After receiving
degrees in organ and piano in 1906, Price returned to
Little Rock to teach. She then chaired the music department
at Clark (now Clark Atlanta University, a historically
black college in Atlanta) before heading back to Little
Rock, where she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer, in
1912.
After
a lynching in Little Rock worsened racial tensions,
the Prices and their children moved to Chicago in 1927.
There, Florence Price's creativity blossomed. In 1932,
her Symphony No. 1 in E minor won first prize in the
Wanamaker Music Composition Contest and was premiered
the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
making Price the first African American woman to have
her work played by a major U.S. orchestra. Her works
were subsequently performed throughout the U.S. and
Europe, and her eloquent arrangements of spirituals
were championed by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and
Marian Anderson. Yet after Price's death in 1953, most
of her compositions were lost or forgotten, and remain
largely unknown and unpublished.
 Why?
Listening to the philharmonic's recording answers this
question. Price's firmly tonal, sweepingly melodic,
and lushly romantic music was utterly untouched by the
spiky, atonal aesthetics of the twentieth century. Too
good a student of the old-fashioned white males who
taught her, Price was branded "conservative." Yet Price
imbued the Western European forms and techniques she
inherited with the melodies, harmonies, and dance rhythms
of African American folk songs and spirituals. A case
in point is the "Mississippi River Suite," all at once
elegiac, majestic, martial, and graceful, folding in
imaginative variations on such familiar spirituals as
"Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen," "Go Down Moses,"
and "Deep River." Another highlight of the CD is Symphony
No. 3 in C minor, a jaunty Gershwinesque scherzo. Played
with grace, and conducted masterfully by Apo Hsu, who
has served as the philharmonic's artistic director since
1997, this recording brings Price back into the public
eye where she belongs.
Cori
Ellison is the dramaturg at the New York City Opera
.
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