FULL CIRCLE
THE UN-SILENCING OF FLORENCE B. PRICE
Two years I completed my first edition of a previously unpublished piano masterpiece by Florence B. Price. I had completed my first research trip to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where many of the extant Price papers are housed, just about a week earlier — gently but firmly encouraged to do so by Lara Downes, who in early March 2018 had stunned the music-loving audiences at my University with two solid days of activities that culminated in a concert featuring a riveting performance of Price’s First (E-minor) Fantasie nègre.
I had begun my own inventory of Price’s unpublished works back in 2011, mostly because I knew that anyone who could create music as wonderful as the few pieces I already knew by Price had to be a good composer. Surely the many hundreds of still-unpublished manuscripts offered other still-unknown works that the world ought to know. I also knew that Florence Price’s musical voice was one that today’s world needs — a voice that had been marginalized in virtually every narrative of music’s history not by accident, but through active erasure motivated by racism and sexism of a sort that has no place in the community of people of good will.
But back then, in 2011 and even 2018, I didn’t know the half of it. When I finally took the plunge into the world of Florence Price’s manuscripts that had been hiding in plain sight and been extensively discussed but scarcely examined since their arrival at the University of Arkansas Libraries, I was stunned, dazzled, amazed. I had expected to find many good pieces and perhaps a few great ones, most or maybe all cut from the same cloth as the few pieces that I had already encountered. What I found instead was a corpus of works whose stylistic and expressive range was nothing short of extraordinary. As I remarked in an e-mail to Lara not long afterward, the sheer staying power of Price’s musical imagination was, in my opinion, unparalleled among other twentieth-century composers. I edited one piece after another that summer, then another, then another and another. And while those pieces clearly flowed from a common source, each was so different from the others that — well, I couldn’t stop. I had to see what came next. All the expectations and limitations that Price’s own world had imposed on her and all the aggressions of later historians who had marginalized her notwithstanding, Florence Price’s musical voice could not and would not be stilled once it began to be committed to print for modern musicians. I had to hear more. And Lara, both tireless and courageous in her pursuits of social justice and musical greatness, eagerly played through all seventy-something pieces that I have edited so far. As of now she has recorded eighteen, most in her series of Florence Price Piano Discoveries. More recordings are to appear next year.
That brings me to my final observation. Recently my friend Doug Schadle, one of the leading voices in the ongoing Florence Price renaissance, pointed out in the tag line to a superb and superbly thoughtful blog post titled “What I Wish Everyone Knew about Florence Price: Words Matter“ that “how we talk about Florence Price matters. A lot.” Those words could not be truer. Doug’s post raised crucial issues concerning not only Price’s biography, the contexts (racial and other) for her music, and her reception, but also her portrayals in modern discourse. As he points out, “consistent problems in how people talk about” Price “perpetuate underlying racism and sexism.” When we buy into White-savior narratives about how a “forgotten” composer was “rediscovered,” first by a young couple renovating a house and then by a major publisher (G. Schirmer) who in 2018 acquired the exclusive international rights to her complete catalog, we force Florence B. Price back into the racist and sexist constraints that her own world tried to impose on her — except that even classist, elitist, racist circles in that world recognized Price’s significance, and continued to do so for more than a decade after her death.
Price resisted that suppression successfully. So how perverse is it for today’s world to take credit for the renown that she achieved in her own day?
The point, though, is that Doug is right. And as I pointed out in a presentation to a session at the national meeting of American Musicological Society last November, there is another gigantic problem with “how we talk [today] about Florence B. Price” — namely, that almost all of the discourse about her centers on the same small body of music that has been available and, in many circles, familiar for many years. Moreover, the works that figure most prominently when Price’s “rediscovery” is discussed today are works in the “large” genres (symphonies, concertos) that are the genres of the “big boys” of the Dead White European Male club in concert music — genres that constitute just a small portion of Price’s sizable output. Discussing those works may feel good, may make us feel that we’re “rediscovering” a “forgotten composer.” But in suppressing the voice of Price the composer of solo-piano works, of songs, of smaller choral compositions, we are not just insisting that the quantitative majority of her output is essentially irrelevant or insignificant. We are also actively turning a deaf ear to most of her musical output and insisting that she matters only when she agrees to play on the same field where we unquestioningly and uncritically welcome Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn (Felix, not Fanny), Schumann (Robert, not Clara), maybe a few others. The racism, sexism, and classism are palpable. And we neither need nor want to perpetuate them.
Of course those “large” works deserve to be celebrated. But if we really want to hear the musical voice of Florence Price that has been suppressed through racism and sexism for more than a century, we have to hear it holistically — and in order to do that we have to cast the net farther, and cast it deeper, than those relatively few outlying works that we’ve always known in genres famously associated with Dead White European Males. We also have to talk about more than Price’s life, more than her background and her reception, more than the racism and sexism that have suppressed and marginalized her musical voice. We have to talk about her music. She self-identified as a composer, after all, and — let’s face it — if not for her music we would not be talking about her at all. So let’s talk about her music — not just the already-familiar stuff and not just the works that agree to the terms set by the Western canon of Dead White European Males, but all of it.
Florence Price’s musical voice is ready to be heard, and it is needed now arguably more than ever. Let’s get on with it.
FULL CIRCLE: the composition by Price that I finished editing two years ago is the Fantasie nègre №2 in G minor, which Price composed some eighty-eight years ago, in March of 1932. It has now been recorded by Lara — the recording, in a wonderful coincidence, was released as a single two years to the day after my first day of work in Fayetteville — and is now a featured track on Lara’s new album Some of These Days. Its world-premiere edition is at press with G. Schirmer. Those two events — Lara’s superbly poetic recording and my edition, which is at press — will bring to fruition a process of letting Florence Price speak that Lara and I took up anew, left over from her own world, two years ago. This is an extraordinary piece, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, study it, and — most importantly — teach it to the generations of today’s younger musicians who expect all of us to introduce them to the beauties and glories of this wonderful art of music. That’s where it belongs.
(First published in Journeys, March 22, 2020)
