Revisiting Price’s Contrapuntal Folk Songs

After over a month I finally found the time to return to the streamed Chamber Music Series presented by SFSymphony+. This was a string quartet performance by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) string section: violinists Wyatt Underhill and Jessie Fellows, violist Matthew Young, and cellist Barbara Bogatin. The music performed was Florence Price’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint, given a brief introduction by Bogatin.

Readers may recall a previous encounter with this music this past November. That also involved San Francisco musicians, the Thalea String Quartet of violinists Christopher Whitley and Kumiko Sakamoto, violist Luis Bellorin, and cellist Titilayo Ayangade; but their performance was live-streamed by the University of Maryland School of Music. The five songs that Price set were “Calvary,” “Clementine,” “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Shortnin’ Bread,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot;” and, at the very least, those selections make it clear that there is considerable breadth to what constitutes a “folksong.”

When I previously wrote about this Price composition, my key observation was the following:

The counterpoint cited in her title is thickly textured, while her harmonies lead the tonal center on a winding path that pretty much loses all account of a “home key.”

Each of the five songs is delivered with a rich variety of abundant embellishment; and, true to Price’s title, one seldom (if ever) encounters and instrumental line serving as an “accompanying voice.” However, for all the sophistication of the five settings, the SFS musicians occasionally revealed suggestions of prankishness that I had not previously noted.

Most interesting on that score was the “Clementine” setting. The opening phrase is given a straightforward delivery, after which it is picked up by another voice starting a fifth higher than the first statement. This is usually the way a fugue begins, but Price was clearly playing with the attentive listener. The suggestion of fugue passes almost as soon as it is posed, as if Price were saying, “You really can’t make a fugue out of this tune!” Instead, the tune prances around to Price’s contrapuntal setting until she feels that all four of the instrumental voices have had a fair say in the matter.

Counterpoint in both audio and video (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

I realized that, in my past writing about Price, I never seemed to call out her capacity for playfulness, which made this SFSymphony+ video release a particularly satisfying listening experience. Once again, that experience was given imaginative visual enhancement. On several occasions the video crew would superimpose the images from two different cameras; and it was only later that I realized that the video direction was exercising its own interpretation of counterpoint!