Florence Price: String Quartet in G, II. Andante moderato
It is, as I write this, one of the last grey and scrawny days of 2020, a year that surely ranks among our greyest and scrawniest. In times like these we need all the good news we can get, so here’s a piece of good, even great news for us all: the world is full of great music we don’t know yet. Just as the stars visible to the naked eye – lovely though they may be – are only a tiny fraction of those in the heavens, the music we know is only a fraction of the music already written. Music can slide into obscurity for any number of reasons, and most of those reasons don’t reflect in the least the quality of the music itself; lots of terrific music is awaiting rediscovery.
Just for example: in 2009 a couple in the small Chicago exurb of St. Anne, Illinois, bought and began renovating a long-abandoned house. In one of the house’s few intact, dry rooms, they discovered boxes and boxes of music manuscripts, many of which bore the name “Florence Price.” Curious, they took to the internet, and discovered that Florence Price had, in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, been a composer of some repute – she had even been, very briefly, famous, the first Black woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra. The small house had once been her summer home, and it had hidden for over half a century most of the musical output of someone who might have become one of the most celebrated American composers.
Florence Price had grown up in the relatively cosmopolitan Little Rock, Arkansas, of the turn of the 20th Century, where Jim Crow laws had not prevented the growth of a well-educated Black elite. She had attended the New England Conservatory, one of the few major music schools open to Black students, and after years spent teaching in her hometown and at Clark University in Atlanta, found herself in Chicago by the end of the 1920’s.
In 1932 she submitted two works to the Wannamaker Foundation’s competition; both won awards, with her First Symphony taking the top prize. The Symphony came to the attention of Friedrich Stock, the Chicago Symphony’s German-born Music Director, and he programmed the piece to general acclaim later that year. A star, it would have appeared, was born.
But the “two handicaps -- those of my sex and race,” as she put it in a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, proved enough to prevent her entering the mainstream in a time when racism and sexism were overt in the music world. Stock might have championed her, but as a German he was drummed out of Chicago as geopolitical tensions mounted. Later works were performed by the Women’s Symphonies of Chicago and Detroit, and she was a leader in the tightly-knit community of Black classical musicians in Chicago, but when she died in 1954 only Black newspapers saw fit to print an obituary. Her reputation, like the moldering boxes of music in the St. Anne house, had been abandoned.
But thanks to the efforts of a few intrepid performers and musicologists like the pianist Karen Walwyn, she had not been entirely forgotten when those boxes of music were discovered. And so a Florence Price revival has been gaining steam in recent years, with works receiving premieres and acclaim 70 and 80 years after their composition and even a profile in The New Yorker.
The Andante on tonight’s program is an early work, dating to 1929. Formally and harmonically it shows the influence of Dvorak and other late Romantic composers, but its melodies bear the distinct pentatonic stamp of the African-American spiritual tradition. It is entirely beautiful, and it offers a powerful hint of the musical treasures still wrongfully neglected in the broken-down corridors of history, and therefore still to come to light.
See a performance
Hear Price’s Work
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.