Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.


https://youtu.be/tZ54dddRI08

Florence Price (1887–1953) was the first Black woman composer to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra. Her Symphony in e minor, which won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards in 1932, received its premiere in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although she won many awards and did have some works published and performed in her lifetime, she still faced discrimination and was unable to get most of her compositions performed. In 1943, she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, “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. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content;—until you shall have examined some of my work? As to the handicap of race, may I relieve you by saying that I neither expect nor ask any concession on that score. I should like to be judged on merit alone.” Apparently, he never responded to her specific concerns, nor did he program any of her music, and after her death she was largely forgotten. And the Boston Symphony Orchestra did not play any of her music until 2019!

Laura Emerick says of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement: “It’s a magnificent journey through all of Price’s musical and cultural inspirations.” The concerto received its premiere in Chicago in 1934 with Price as the piano soloist. Don Anderson says, “Although it is technically in one movement, there are three distinct sections played without a break, following the practice established by such composers as Liszt and Mendelssohn. The first begins with an introduction in slow tempo, and continues with an urgent and lyrical principal section. The slow-tempo central panel is tender, nostalgic and more lightly scored than the opening section. The concerto concludes with a sprightly example of a juba, a folk dance that was popular in the years before the Civil War, a sort of proto-rag.”

Sadly, the original manuscript was lost. There apparently were no performances of the concerto after the 1930s. In 2011, The Center for Black Music Research commissioned the composer Trevor Weston to reconstruct the orchestration, and maybe now this work will get the attention that it deserves.

My classical music post for today is Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement.

 


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