“She was able to use a wide range of influences,” White says. Passagework aside, White is especially drawn to the concertos’ lush slow sections with their blue-note inflections. Overall, the work plays well and sounds the best when it sounds effortless. “There were some passages that I changed ever so slightly, just to make it manageable at the tempos that she wanted. “Once I got the part and started working through it, it actually took quite a bit of time to find a fingering that would lie comfortably on the instrument,” White says of Violin Concerto No. Neither of the scores exists with notes or instructions from the composer. The second concerto, an almost cinematic composition finished in 1952, was performed twice by its dedicatee, Chicago violinist Minnie Cedargreen Jemberg. 1 after its completion in 1939, and it is unclear if Price ever had a Joseph Joachim–like figure to answer technical questions or give feedback as she was composing. There is no evidence of any performances of the Violin Concerto No. Photo courtesy University of Arkansas-Kettering and Reynolds I only wish I knew who her violinist friends were at the time and who she was able to be in touch with and get that feedback.” Florence Price as a young adult. “It blows my mind that Florence did all of this. “Florence Price was writing at a very unjust and unequal moment in history, and that makes me wonder about the access that she had to violinists,” says White, who is scheduled to perform the concertos in January 2022 with the National Philharmonic under the direction of Piotr Gajewski. Her instrumental works fell by the wayside after her death, only to gradually resurface since 2009.

Other champions of her music included the soprano Leontyne Price and the contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom sang her arrangements of spirituals at Carnegie Hall.īut despite close ties to the Black intelligentsia, including writer Langston Hughes, Price was frequently denied opportunities and had to make ends meet by playing the organ for silent film screenings and writing advertising jingles.

orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented her Symphony in E minor in 1933. The Arkansas-born, New England Conservatory–trained composer became the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major U.S. “I don’t know how many folks would respond like that to, say, recordings of Bach solo sonatas, unless it was something infamous at this point.” “It’s amazing for me to have so many conversations with strangers who have been so affected by her music,” says violinist Er-Gene Kahng, who in 2018 released an agenda-setting recording of Price’s violin concertos with the Janáček Philharmonic and conductor Ryan Cockerham. And a new scholarly biography of Price from Oxford University Press is in the works, fueling interest in the pathbreaking African-American composer, who died in 1953 at the age of 66. Schirmer, which acquired the music publishing rights to her catalog in 2018, will issue the first edition of the Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint for string quartet late this year. 1 and 2 by violinist Melissa White (with a future recording planned). Forming part of a larger catalog that numbers as many as 250 works, the string repertoire highlights Price’s gift for sumptuous harmonies, soaring lyricism, and references to spirituals and Juba dances.Įarly 2022 is expected to bring the release of a two-CD set by the Catalyst Quartet featuring Price’s quartets and quintets, and performances of her Violin Concertos Nos. The 19-box cache, found in her abandoned former summer house near Chicago, has yielded numerous published editions of her music for strings, including two violin concertos, four string quartets, two piano quintets, and various showpieces for violin and piano. The discovery in 2009 of a trove of manuscripts once belonging to the composer Florence Price is a gift that keeps on giving to string players. And is here to support you and the string world with fantastic content (like this story!) If you like what we do, please make a donation to support our work and keep the site running.īy Brian Wise | From the November-December 2021 issue of Strings magazine

Florence price