Lara Downes Celebrates the 19th Amendment

91Classical is the classical music radio station for Nashville, Tennessee, owned by Nashville Public Radio. However two of the announcers, Colleen Phelps and Rachel Iacovone, have been adding video to the mix, creating program content that can be viewed through Facebook and other platforms. Yesterday Phelps hosted a program to honor Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on August 18, 1920, thus providing the necessary 36 ratifying states to secure adoption. (As recently observed, adoption was not certified until August 26; but yesterday was significant for Tennessee’s role in the process.)

Phelps marked the occasion by hosting a half-hour recital by pianist Lara Downes, who presented a program consisting entirely of music composed by women. This included a world premiere performance of “Quiet Streets,” a short work by Elena Ruehr, which may have been conceived in preparation for a more extended piano concerto. The program also included two pieces from the Twenties, which had been composed in the wake of the ratification process. The earlier of these was Amy Beach’s “Farewell Summer,” from her Opus 102 collection, which she composed in 1924. This was followed by the first of Florence Price’s “Fantasie nègre” compositions (in the key of E minor), which she completed in 1929 and revised in 1931.

The videos of these performances were made at Downes’ home, playing on her Yamaha grand. However, one of the selections was recorded earlier at National Sawdust. This was a duo performance with Simone Dinnerstein, both playing Bösendorfer instruments. They joined forces to present Meredith Monk’s “Ellis Island.” The program then concluded back at Downes’ home with her playing Jed Distler’s solo piano arrangement of “God Bless the Child,” one of Billie Holiday’s best-known songs, which she composed with Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939.

This made for a rich diversity of styles and rhetoric, all packed into a half-hour duration. Since I am on the “final stretch” in reading The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown, I welcomed having yet another opportunity to listen to Downes playing Price’s music. Having listened to my recording of her playing the “Fantasie nègre” rather frequently, I found myself comparing Price’s “fantasy technique” to the Hungarian “rhapsodies” composed by Franz Liszt. Just as Liszt drew upon Hungarian music as sources for rich embellishment, Price had done the same with the spiritual “Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass,” which probably emerged from the slave culture that had grown prior to the Civil War.

To a great extent, there was a thread of alienation that wove through many of Downes’ selections (whether or not she had explicitly intended that rhetorical stance). Thus, the spiritual theme behind Price’s “Fantasie” reverberated a decade later in “God Bless the Child.” Similarly, Monk’s “Ellis Island” evoked the alienation of those that had escaped oppression in the “Old World” only to confront it again in the intimidating bureaucracy on an island not far from the coasts of both Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Mind you, I do not think that Downes was deliberately trying to be depressing with her selections. Nevertheless, if Phelps’ program had been intended to honor American women overcoming a major act of discrimination, the historical context reminds us all that discrimination continued to prevail in many different aspects of American life. Indeed, we only have to follow the progress of the Black Lives Matter movement to appreciate that the capacity for discrimination is still with us.