August 28, 2020 – Part II Honoring Florence Price and Women’s Equality Week: Travelling Towards Equality

Welcome to Part II in Our Celebration of Florence Price and Women’s Equality Week, a special addition follow up to this week’s Monday Musicale with the Maestro!

Travelling Towards Equality

This week marks the celebration of 100 years of universal suffrage for American women. This came too late for my grandmothers, both of whom died before 1920. But my mother (born in 1916) and my stepmother (still going strong at 106!) were both strong advocates for the necessity of voting. My mother was a poll worker during the last 25 years of her life, and I vividly remember my pride in being with her on those long days. I have been thinking of her the last few weeks as I’ve watched the political conventions, something she encouraged me to do starting in 1964, when I was ten.

That was the year the Republican presidential candidate was Barry Goldwater, who was akin to the devil in my African-American household because he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That election year, his position was celebrated by white southerners, and almost overnight the southern states went from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. In a recent article in The National Review (29 June 2020), Matthew Scully tries to explain Goldwater’s disgraceful position by saying, “Goldwater was overthinking the constitutional arguments against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” For now, I will leave that stink bomb floating in the air. But I will state this for all who still seem confused: the phrase “Black Lives Matter” does NOT mean that only Black lives matter. No one–Black, gay, or female–has ever wanted “special” rights. The correct term is EQUAL RIGHTS.

In this spirit, I would like to close out the week by dedicating my comments to Women’s Equality Day August 26, 2020, and the memory of my mother, Florence Hamilton Curry.

Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953)

In this week’s Monday Musicale we introduced a brief selection, “Nimble Feet,” by the African-American composer Florence Price, whose rediscovery in 2009 started the most noteworthy classical music revival since Mahler’s in 1960. Her fascinating story is now the subject of two biographies and several documentaries, and every American orchestra is starting to add her works to their repertoire.

Florence Beatrice Smith was born into a middle-class family in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She began her piano studies at age three, graduated high school as class valedictorian at age fourteen, and that same year was admitted to the New England Conservatory in Boston to study piano and organ. It was one of the finest music schools of the day, but it was still bound by segregationist policies. So I must emphasize here that neither the school’s administration nor the students knew that Florence was Black. She was very light-skinned, and her mother had insisted that she “pass” by describing herself as Mexican when she applied. Florence flourished there and began composing, completing her first symphony before graduating with honors in 1906 as the holder of a teaching certificate and an artist diploma in the organ.

After college, she briefly headed the Department of Music at a historically Black college in Atlanta now called Clark University. In 1912 she returned to Little Rock and married a lawyer, Thomas Price, giving private music lessons and raising two daughters. But times were tense there. When a lynching terrorized the community in 1927, the Price family fled to Chicago to start anew. Florence had never stopped composing, however, and in Chicago a dramatic breakthrough occurred.

In 1932 her Symphony No. 3 won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards, and her first piano concerto took the third prize. Her Symphony No. 3 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on June 15, 1933—the first performance by a major orchestra of a work by an African-American woman. It was a success, and in 1934, the orchestra premiered the piano concerto, with Florence herself as the soloist. A number of her orchestral works were performed afterward by other orchestras, such as the WPA Symphony of Detroit and the Chicago Women’s Symphony.

Encouraged, Florence found original music gushing from her like a fountain. But soon she hit the proverbial “glass ceiling.” Despite submitting her works to publishers and famous conductors, she rarely received a reply. After a few years of banging her head against this ceiling she realized that for a female African-American composer, recognition was virtually impossible. One of her last letters attempting to introduce her award-winning music was written in November 1943 to Serge Koussevitzky, who was then the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He holds a permanent place in music history as a fervent advocate for great young American composers of his era such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Roy Harris. Florence must have felt she was writing to someone who could help her significantly. “My Dear Dr. Koussevitzky,” she wrote, “to begin with, I have two handicaps. . .those of my sex and my race. I am a woman and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” Yet this plaintive letter went unanswered.

Afterwards, she ceased all attempts to promote her music—but she never stopped composing. She wrote a fourth symphony, two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, piano and organ works, chamber music, songs, jingles for radio commercials, and arrangements–one of which (“My Soul Been Anchored in Lord”) was chosen by renowned contralto Marian Anderson to end her famous 1939 recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The DSO both played and recorded ” My Soul been Anchored in the Lord” which was featured in Monday Musicale with the Maestro on April 27, 2020.

[story continues after video]

Nothing could have been more fitting: the talents of two brilliant African-American women blending in a kind of benediction at the massive event that some see as the first mass gathering of the Civil Rights Movement. In terms of women’s equality, however, the occasion was also deeply ironic in a way Florence Price could not have missed understanding. Though Marian Anderson was already famous throughout the U.S. and Europe and was beloved by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she was denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution and sang outdoors instead, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. For women of color—and even the most gifted artists among them—the road to true equality would be much longer. The concert was recorded for a national broadcast—but sadly, for Florence Price and posterity, the encore “My Soul Been Anchored in the Lord” was not recorded.

Florence died in 1953, and her manuscripts went to one of her daughters, who failed in her attempts to bring her mother’s music to the public. After this daughter’s death, Florence’s music was presumed to be lost. Then the miracle happened. In 2009 Florence’s abandoned summer home in Chicago was scheduled for destruction. But only days before, workers found three large boxes containing hundreds of “lost” compositions by Florence Price. And the rest, as they say, is history. Since that discovery, dozens of American orchestras have performed her work and many of her major compositions have now been recorded.

Though trained in European music traditions, Price’s music is closely based on African-American spirituals and idioms which she never quotes directly. The DSO’s August 24^th installment of Monday Musicale  featured “Nimble Feet,” an excerpt from Dances in the Canebrake, one of Price’s last compositions. Over the last two seasons the DSO has played all three movements of this magnificent work in its orchestral arrangement. The fast, outer movements were inspired by the cakewalk dance and syncopated rhythms heard in the works by the American composers of a generation before her, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Scott Joplin. The middle movement, a languorous and peaceful intermezzo, is titled “Tropical Noon.”

The final selection, “Silk Hat and Walking Cane,” is a jaunty dance of great charm. Listening, one can imagine a debonair Black man out for a leisurely stroll in his best attire, walking confidently with a certain degree of pride in his bearing. This may well be a loving portrait of Price’s own father, who was almost beaten to death by a gang of Irish thugs in New York for his “sin” of wearing a tall silk hat.

Dances from the Canebrakes was composed for piano, but the year after Price’s death, the African-American composer William Grant Still produced the wonderful orchestral version you heard in Monday’s video. We are fortunate to have his orchestration, which has brought Florence Price’s work to broader audiences.

During his lifetime, Still came to be known as “the Dean of African-American composers”. He could also be called the “Dean of Musical Firsts”. In this sense he was somewhat the counterpart of Florence Price, being the first African-American male composer to write a symphony and see it performed by a major orchestra. Yet as a male composer, William Grant Still was able to achieve far broader recognition in his lifetime than Florence Price could attain in hers. He was the first African-American to write a symphony and to write an opera for the New York City Opera company. He was also the first to have an opera played on national television and to conduct a major American orchestra. I have always felt a personal connection with William Grant Still. He was born on May 11, 1895–20 years to the day before the birth of my father, William Henry Curry, Sr. He graduated from my alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory, and he was the first African-American to conduct a concert with a southern orchestra—as I am the first Music Director of a southern symphony orchestra.

I have been friends with Judith Still (the daughter of William Grant Still) for twenty years, a witness to her tireless promotion of both her father’s music and racial harmony in this country. For the DSO’s Songs of the South concert at the Hayti Heritage Center (3 March 2019), I asked her to write a statement about her father and Florence Price that I could share with the audience. I am proud to share that with you here:

Can I get an Amen on that?!

William Henry Curry
Music Director, Durham Symphony Orchestra

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