John Jeter’s Second Naxos Florence Price Album

Colorized photograph of Florence Price at the piano on the cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Naxos of America)

Some readers may recall that, in August of last year, I wrote about the Naxos American Classics release of two symphonies composed by Florence Price: the first in E minor (which had been performed here in San Francisco by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in March of 2019) and the fourth in D minor, which was a world premiere recording. Both symphonies were performed by the Fort Smith Symphony at the ArcBest Performing Arts Center on May 13 and 14, 2018 in Fort Smith, Arkansas with John Jeter conducting. This Friday Naxos will release a second American Classics album of Jeter conducting Price’s music.

This time he is conducting the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in studio sessions that took place in March of 2020 and April of 2021. The major work on this album is the third symphony in C minor, coupled with two tone poems, “The Mississippi River” and “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America.” As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for taking pre-orders.

When I wrote about Jeter’s first album, I observed that it is “hard to avoid recognizing the influences of Antonín Dvořák.” However, by the time Price had advanced to her third symphony, which she completed in 1940, she had progressed beyond those influences. This is one of several compositions that identifies a movement as “Juba,” a jazzy style that does not seem to have influenced any of Price’s European contemporaries or predecessors. Indeed, in contrast to some of her earlier works, she does not draw upon quotation of influential sources from either the southern states or Africa.

One is likely to approach the Juba movement as the scherzo of the symphony, having been preceded by the opening Allegro with Andante introduction, followed by an Andante ma non troppo movement. However, the final movement is explicitly labeled as a Scherzo, almost as if Price was determined to tweak the expectations of her listeners. On the other hand she may simply have wished to follow the syncopations of Juba with the more “reliable” triple-meter vigor of a “European” scherzo.

To be fair, however, Price is probably the best spokesperson for this particular composition. In her biography of Florence Price, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, Rae Linda Brown quoted a letter that Price wrote to Frederick Schwass, an administrator of the Michigan WPA orchestra:

I have your letter of October 21 [1940]. The Symphony No. 3 in C Minor was composed in the late summer of 1938, laid aside for a year and then revised. It is intended to be Negroid in character and expression. In it no attempt, however, has been made to project Negro music solely in the purely traditional manner. None of the themes are adaptations or derivations of folk songs.

The intention behind the writing of this work was a not too deliberate attempt to picture a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day.

The reminder of this album suggests that Jeter may wish to have given an account of that “purely traditional manner” that Price wished to avoid. “The Mississippi River” abounds with familiar references, primarily to spirituals. Indeed, one may even say that her appropriation of those references involved treatments similar to those Dvořák engaged in his “American influences.” That said, however, there is a citation of a cowboy song in an Allegretto portion of the score that left me wondering if Price knew as much about black cowboys in her day as we do today (when we now have the benefit of a Wikipedia page on that topic).

“Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” is the earliest composition on the album. It was composed for submission to a competition held to promote recognition of black composers. It shared honorable mention with a composition by J. Harold Brown, which is about all that Rae Linda Brown had to say about it in her book. Personally, I find the music a bit to sunny to reflect a rhetoric of shadows. Was Price deliberately evoking a cheerful rhetoric to improve her chances of winning the competition? As they used to say on the radio, “Only The Shadow knows!”