Monday Musicale with the Maestro – August 24, 2020 – Honoring Florence Price and Women’s Equality Day (August 26th)
Honoring Florence Price and Women’s Equality Day (August 26th)
Since the 2009 discovery of her manuscripts in a condemned house, interest in the music of African-American composer Florence Price has taken the classical music world by storm. Not since the 1960 Centennial of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler have we seen such a renaissance, and performances of Price’s work are now blossoming forth to the delight of audiences nationwide.
In 1887 Florence Beatrice Smith was born into a middle-class family in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was exceptional from the start, beginning piano studies at the age of three and giving her first concert the next year. At the age of fourteen, she was admitted to America’s finest music school at that time, The New England Conservatory in Boston, and it was during those years that she began to compose. She graduated with honors in 1907.
She won many honors, and two of her major works (her Symphony No. 3 and her piano concerto) received groundbreaking performances by the Chicago Symphony. Yet as a woman and an African-American, she found it virtually impossible to further promote her work. In the 1940s, she ceased all attempts. But that did not stop her from composing, and she continued to do so in complete anonymity until her death in 1953.
For more on her dramatic and inspirational journey, watch for our Conductors Corner essay later this week!
Today’s video is DSO’s performance of “Nimble Feet,” an elegant piece from one of her last piano compositions, Dances in the Canebrakes (1953). Though Price never quotes directly from African-American spirituals and idioms, her music is closely based on them. Her title refers to dense thickets of sugarcane, one of the most important pre-Civil War crops grown on southern plantations.
Today’s performance features the 1953 orchestral arrangement of Price’s work by William Grant Still, known as “the Dean of African-American Composers.”
Florence Price arr W. G. Still: “Nimble Feet” from Dances in the Canebrakes.
William Henry Curry
Music Director, Durham Symphony Orchestra
Durham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maestro William Henry Curry
Florence Price arr W. G. Still: “Nimble Feet” from Dances in the Canebrakes.
The Carolina Theatre – Nov 03, 2019
‘A Tribute to the 100th Anniversary of American Women’s Suffrage’
Celebrating Maestro Curry’s 50 years conducting
& 11 years with the Durham Symphony!
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This project was supported by the Durham Arts Council’s Annual Arts Fund and the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.