Florence Price Symphonies on Naxos

Portrait of Florence Price (colorized by Olga Shirnina) on the cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Naxos of America)

For about a month I have been working my way through the new biography of Florence Price, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown. Unfortunately, Brown died before her manuscript was published as a book by the University of Illinois Press. Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. supervised the final editing of that manuscript prior to publication, and the book first appeared for sale on Amazon.com this past June 22 with Web pages for both hardcover and paperback editions.

I plan to write about this book on this site, and I have less than a dozen pages to go before completing it. However, I realize that my experiences of listening to Price’s music have been limited. My first encounter seems to have taken place in March of 2019, when I wrote about the Project W album released by Cedille Records, based on a project to explore the music of women composers planned by the Chicago Sinfonietta and its Music Director Mei-Ann Chen. During that same month, the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, here in San Francisco, presented a performance of Price’s first symphony in E minor. (This followed up on a performance of the third symphony in C minor by the Oakland East Bay Symphony, which, unfortunately, I had not attended.) My other major source for listening has been pianist Lara Downes, who first included Price on her America Again album, released in October of 2016, and most recently released a series of four EP albums entitled Florence Price: Piano Discoveries.

Recently I realized that I could revisit Price’s first symphony through the Naxos American Classics series. The CD featured the world premiere recording of Price’s fourth symphony coupled with a performance of the first. John Jeter conducted concert performances by the Fort Smith Symphony at the ArcBest Performing Arts Center on May 13 and 14, 2018 in Fort Smith, Arkansas; and recordings of those performances were used for the Naxos album, which was released on December first of that same year.

Sadly, this recording is a testimony to the snail’s pace of the production of scholarly books. Brown died in 2017. As a result, she has little to say about the fourth symphony:

Price continued to write large-scale works during the 1940s and the 1950s: in addition to the Symphony No. 3, she composed the Symphony in D minor, which I assume to be her fourth symphony. The undated work is lost and there appear to have been no performances.

In the words of “Amazing Grace,” the symphony “once was lost but now is found.” Sadly, Brown never lived to account for this transition in her manuscript, let alone enjoy the opportunity of listening to that symphony.

Taken in its entirety, the album provides an excellent introduction to Price’s skill in writing extended multi-movement compositions for a large ensemble. It is hard to avoid recognizing the influences of Antonín Dvořák; but, of course, this is an account of music “from the new world” by someone that lived in that world. The other influence that is frequently cited is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the English composer of mixed-race birth.

Nevertheless, Price has a much richer hand in working with her sources. On a smaller scale much of her effort went into arranging traditional spirituals. The fourth symphony begins with an example of how those efforts were escalated to a broader symphonic scale. The opening theme of the first movement takes “Wade in the Water” as a point of departure without explicitly trying to quote it or weave variations around it. Where Price takes a more explicit approach to her sources can be found in the scherzos of both the first and fourth symphonies, both of which are identified as “Juba Dance,” drawing upon a dance that originated in Charleston, South Carolina, through slaves brought to the United States from the Kingdom of Kongo.

That said, the rhetoric of both symphonies tends to be founded upon symphonic traditions from the late nineteenth century. Price was aware of what American composers were doing during the first half of the twentieth century. She even helped to promote some of them, such as John Alden Carpenter. Nevertheless, her approach to symphonic form finds its uniqueness from thematic material that relates back to African-American sources. As a result, there is a much richer sense of “Americanism” in her symphonic music than one ever encounters in even the most perceptive efforts by Dvořák.