There are three live concerts this month - did I say "live"? (yes - yes, I did!) - each of them beginning at 7:30. With the usual site at Market Square Church still in the process of renovation, all three concerts are being held at St. Michael Lutheran Church on State Street in downtown Harrisburg, just down from the State Capitol between Front & 2nd Streets.
Since you don't come to the Market Square Concerts Blog for up-dates on the Pandemic, let's just say we continue to monitor the situation since, as you're probably aware, the situation is not yet stable.
We are committed to the safety of our audience, our musicians and our community, so we will continue to closely monitor CDC guidelines and will adjust our safety protocols in response to any changes. Presently, we respectfully ask those audience members who have not been vaccinated to wear a mask.
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Years ago, when concerts offered you a "diverse" program, it usually meant three or four Dead European Guys (or maybe a token American) from different musical eras: one from Column Classical, one or two from Column Romantic (Early, Late or Beethoven), and maybe one from Column Early 20th Century, with a rare live one thrown in quietly so as not to scare anyone off.
These days, "diversity" has taken on a whole different aura.
Until fairly recently, the idea of a "Woman Composer" was treated as something that needed to be pointed out (not that we'd ever refer to Beethoven as a "Man Composer"). In the 1986-87 Season, the Harrisburg Symphony, under Larry Newland, included a "woman composer" on each of its subscription concerts, six of them still living (I had a chance to interview them in pre-concert talks) and it was largely dismissed as a "gimmick."
It took a while, but now they're just "Composers."
Similar paths in our culture have impeded the acceptance of race on our concert stages. And while it too is becoming "more acceptable," the musical and cultural variety this offers us reflects the wider influences Classical Music has absorbed over the past now that programming is finally emerging beyond the influences of The European Tradition. It can now embrace composers who could find inspiration from folk music (considered unacceptable on concert stages in much of the 19th Century) to jazz to, now, rock music, world music, and innumerable other forms of music we can experience around us.
And especially that experience offered by composers who happen to be Black, Latino, and Native-American.
Summermusic's first program includes three composers: Florence Price, an African-American woman who grew up in Little Rock, studied in Boston, spent most of her professional life in Chicago, and became the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra; Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, an American composer and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, writes music infused with what can be called "The Native-American Experience" in his quartet, "Pisachi" (the Chickasaw word for "reveal") which honors his Hopi and Pueblo cousins "through classical repertoire"; and Maurice Ravel who might seem the Token Dead European Guy, but who was a Frenchman who also happened to be gay.
The second program on Saturday, July 24th, features Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana and "Bach's Long Shadow" in music for solo violin which, in addition to Bach, Paganini, Ysaÿe, Hindemith and Kreisler, includes Korean-born Isang Yun and fellow-Spaniards Joan Valent and Salvador Brotons.
The Harlem Quartet's program next Tuesday, July 27th, offers works by William Grant Still (often called "The Dean of African-American Composers"), George Walker (the first African-American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music), "Dizzy" Gillespie, Billy Strayhorn, and Wynton Marsalis, as well as Tomeka Reid and Jessie Montgomery.
But in this post, I'm writing about Florence Price and the String Quartet that opens the series this Wednesday, July 21st. (Read about and listen to Jerod Tate's and Maurice Ravel's quartets in this second post, here.)
In 1943, Florence Price wrote to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitsky, asking him to consider programming some of her music, and wrote “to begin with, I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”
If you're like me, regardless of your involvement in the rarefied world of Classical Music, you may wonder why you've probably never heard of Florence Price before a few years ago (it's possible you're hearing her music here for the first time). Most of that can be laid upon the doorstep of Race and Gender with a healthy amount of finger-pointing at the fickleness of musical culture in general. While her music was basically overlooked, “musical culture in general” has tended to push the leading composers of her and her mentors' generations into the dim shadows of our current unawareness of American Music History which, for most music-lovers in the audience, probably begins with Charles Ives, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland.
Her own teacher at the New England Conservatory, George Whitefield Chadwick, was a leader of the “2nd New England School” of American composers from the generation before Ives in the late-19th Century. And while Chadwick, along with John Knowles Paine, created a considerable repertoire once widely performed by American musicians, it is sad these names soon disappeared from our concert stages.
Chadwick had studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke who, as far as the begats went, studied with Mendelssohn and Schumann (he would also teach the likes of Grieg, Janáček, Albeniz, and Max Bruch). So, one could say Florence Price's own musical roots would include a great deal of German Romanticism of the Classical Persuasion (Mendelssohn as opposed to the more hyper-Romantic world of Liszt and Wagner).
Following the advice Antonín Dvořák was giving his students at the National Conservatory in New York in the mid-1890s – that American composers should look to American folk music to find their inspiration just as he had looked to his own native Bohemian folk music to find his natural musical voice – Chadwick suggested to Florence Smith (not yet Price) she should examine her own cultural roots to find inspiration in what are still usually referred to as Negro Spirituals as well as the popular urban dance music that was inspiring Scott Joplin (his early “Maple Leaf Rag” dates from 1899).
Sometimes, this influence is overt – the “Five Folksongs in Counterpoint” for String Quartet (sometimes referred to as "Five Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint" though only three of them based on African-American songs) which might date from 1927 but was added to and revised in 1951, and only recently discovered on a shelf in a Little Rock library; or the “Juba” dance that's the scherzo of her 1st Symphony. Other times, the mood of this music (certainly the mellowness of some of the melodies and harmonies) can be heard lurking behind the European influences that were the initial core of her training.
After teaching in Little Rock, then Atlanta, she married a Black lawyer from Little Rock in 1912, but the Price family with their two daughters decided to leave town following the lynching of a Black man in 1927. They settled in Chicago where Florence resumed her musical studies in composition, orchestration, and organ with, among others, Leo Sowerby (though probably as an organist rather than a composer). In 1931, she and her husband divorced, financial hardship and abuse apparently being the main cause.
Since this 1st String Quartet was written in 1929, we don't really need to continue the biography, here, except to point out, as styles changed and her Romantic-era colleagues fell into what I call “Forgottenhood,” what music of hers that was getting performed disappeared from the concert halls: particularly her Symphony in E Minor (published as No. 1) which the Chicago Symphony premiered in 1933, making her the first African-American Woman to have a work performed by a major orchestra.
Some of her works were performed in 2001 by the Women's Philharmonic before it disbanded in 2004, and soon the search was on to find more of her music: this rather telling (if not chilling) paragraph from her Wikipedia entry, explains a lot:
“In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers were found in an abandoned dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois. These consisted of dozens of her scores, including her two violin concertos and her fourth symphony. As Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, 'not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history'.
Only in 2019 did the publisher, G. Schirmer, announce they'd acquired worldwide rights to her complete catalog (or at least such as we know still exists).
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The Jasper Quartet performs it for us to open this first of our 2021 Summermusic concerts. This video presents Florence Price's String Quartet in G Major as the opening of one of their full concert videos available on-line, recorded earlier this year. Ms. Price's Quartet begins at 1:42 and ends at 14:27.
This G Major String Quartet is in two movements. The first, a standard sonata form, strikes me as “very European,” as if she's consciously trying to imitate a Brahmsian style. I could understand that if this were a student work, but in 1929 she was by now long past the New England Conservatory and, at the age of 42, hardly had need of being so derivative. Unless this might have initially been an assignment (judging from certain aspects of the opening theme, I'm guessing Brahms' B-flat Sextet might have been a model or at least an inspiration) from one of her Chicago teachers.
The second movement is a different story and a decidedly American one, a folk-like simplicity pervades the tune – truly a song and very much a lullaby – as if she had done exactly what Dvořák (and Chadwick) had recommended decades earlier. The contrasting minor-key middle section brings Dvořák to mind in other ways, as if he were still writing inspired by his summer visits to Iowa. Like many beautiful slow movements, this one could easily stand alone, perhaps not as intense as the Adagio from Samuel Barber's quartet, but lovely and certainly leaving you with wanting more.
Whatever this dichotomy means – the European imitation, the American absorption – a few other facts: one of Price's teachers when she arrived in Chicago in 1927 was Carl Busch, a Danish-born composer mostly associated with the Kansas City Symphony (it's a long story); as a composer, he's “primarily associated with the Indianist Movement,” taking Dvořák one step further (what does an American composer of Danish heritage call his innate cultural folk-music if he wants to “sound American”?) and finding his inspirations in the songs and dances of the Native-Americans (which, after all, is the “original folk music of America,” since everything else is, one way or another, music introduced by immigrants). Was the first movement an assignment from a European-based teacher (“here's some Brahms; go and do likewise”), and was this second movement one in which, perhaps, Busch said “find something from your own cultural heritage (a theme, a mood, a sound) and turn it into something like, oh, I don't know, Dvořák's Largo from 'The New World Symphony'?” Did she now find herself with two pieces for string quartet and put them together to make a String Quartet?
She was not without performances and recognition but nothing that could yet be mistaken for fame. Also in 1929, her Fantasie nègre (she originally had called it “Negro Fantasy”) was premiered at a concert of the National Association of Negro Musicians [NANM]. A critic writing for the Associated Negro Press wrote, “The surprise of the evening was a most effective composition by Mrs. F. B. Price, entitled 'A Negro Phantasy,' played by the talented Chicago pianiste, Margaret Bonds [a student of Price's]. The entire association could well afford to recommend this number to all advanced pianists.”
And while she was just beginning to take her composing more seriously – in addition to working as an organist for silent film theaters and writing “songs for radio ads” under an assumed name – there were few outlets for an African-American (much less an African-American Woman) beyond organizations specifically for the Negro Musician. Was the first movement of this quartet an attempt at “musical assimilation,” to break into the musical world of upper-class White Chicago?
I admit much of this is conjecture on my part – I haven't found answers to any of the questions hearing this music has raised in my mind. It makes me wonder if there isn't another movement or two lying around somewhere or if this was (so to speak) all she wrote? I admit I haven't had time to dig into this – was this work printed in 1929 when sources say it was composed? Or is the modern edition based on a manuscript that might be incomplete? Could there be a dance movement and a lively finale somewhere still waiting for the light of day? (And who am I to suggest we shouldn't play Schubert's “Unfinished Symphony” just because it's only two movements?)
- Dick Strawser
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