Twelve years prior to composing her Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Florence Price had her first symphony premiered at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and in doing so became the first black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. Following the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance, the work inspired effusive praise in white and black press alike. The Chicago Defender’s Robert Abbot wrote that “when, after the number was completed, the large auditorium, filled to the brim with music lovers of all races, rang out in applause for the composer and the orchestral rendition, it seemed that the evening could hold no greater thrills.”
With America in the heart of the Jim Crow era, and with 50 years of violence and disenfranchisement having dismantled much of the progress made by black Americans during reconstruction, the elevation of Price’s work was a testament to its singular merit. Yet despite its jubilant reception, the symphony was swiftly marginalized and rarely performed thereafter. Price would compose three more symphonies and advocate boldly for her music, but with little success. The reasons were clear enough, and Price wasn’t afraid to state them plainly, even to the likes of Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony. In July 1943, Price wrote,
My dear Koussevitzky,
To begin with I have two handicaps – those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.
Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content; – until you have examined some of my work?
As to the handicap of race, may I relieve you by saying that I neither expect nor ask any concession on that score. I should like to be judged on merit alone – the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work…to even consent to examine a score…
Following her death in 1953, Americans forgot about Price’s work even as it gained recognition in Canada and Europe. Only recently has public interest accelerated in the U.S.. American orchestras are performing and recording her works, major publishers are distributing her music, scholars and musicologists are producing biographies and critical editions, and in 2009 a newly-discovered collection of manuscripts caught the attention of media outlets across the nation. One of those manuscripts was the Symphony No. 4 in D minor.
The Music
Composed in 1945, lost before it was ever heard, found in Price’s summer home some 64 years later, and finally premiered in 2018, Price’s Fourth Symphony is a complex work that defies summary because it defies our expectations. Each movement begins with melodies and harmonies that feel familiar enough. Indeed, comparisons are often made to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Antonin Dvořák, whose works also drew from both European classicism and the music of black and indigenous Americans. But just as these familiar sounds are established, Price injects denser harmonies and fragmented melodies layered one on top of the other. This is one of Price’s symphonic signatures – an ongoing tension between the familiar and the unsettling, the whole and the broken, the seemingly simple and the truly complex.
I. Tempo moderato
The first movement’s melodies are composed in the mode of Negro spirituals and built in part on the opening bars of “Wade in the water.” They move at first through warm, supportive harmonies and phrases that come naturally to rest. But soon they are wrapped up in more complex harmonies, broken up and tossed around the orchestra and driven into louder, thicker orchestrations. Repeatedly the music is interrupted by strange brass chorales, militaristic marches and explosive interjections from bass drum and tuba, all before finally racing toward an unsettling end.
It is difficult to walk the line between artistic influence and socio-historical interpretation when considering Price’s symphonies, perhaps especially so in this one. Some 50 years prior, Dvořák had told the New York Herald that, “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” Musicologist and Price biographer Rae Linda Brown suggests that “The inspiration for Price’s Symphony [No. 1] in E Minor was undoubtedly Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 Symphony No. 9, ‘From the New World’,” and that, “To judge from its overall content, formal organization, orchestration, and spirit, she seems to have taken quite personally the Bohemian composer’s directive to create a national composition.” Yet, in her Second Symphony, Price captures the “spirit” of Negro spirituals — either by directly quoting them or creating original themes in the same style — while simultaneously deconstructing their melodies. Perhaps there is some kind of extra-musical commentary here, or perhaps this is simply the maturing of Price’s unique compositional voice.
II. Andante cantabile
The opening theme of the second movement sets up a new tension in a languid dialogue between solo oboe, violins, a group of woodwinds, and a solo cello. The oboe’s phrase is quintessentially pastoral, calling on Dvořák’s New World Symphony and its nostalgic view of American landscapes. The violins’ minor key response is altogether more burdened, its downward glissando (sliding note) bearing the weight of some apparent sadness. A woodwind chorale, led by a dusky flute, repeats the violin phrase, but with a suspended harmony that hangs in the air, unresolved. Finally a solo cello recounts the oboe’s bucolic song, but the deeper, more resonant timbre of the cello somehow changes its meaning. It is a world of timbral and emotional complexity packed into 60 seconds of music.
What do we make of such instrumental and rhetorical contrast, both in the original presentation of the theme and in its deconstruction across the remainder of the movement? As in the first movement, these melodies give way to unexpected and sometimes disconcerting interjections — chromatic brass chorales, the wild crash of a gong, and places where the music suddenly comes to a halt.
III. Juba Dance
Prior to 1800, most symphonic third movements were minuets, a lilting dance from the courts of France. Beethoven, Schubert, and later composers increasingly opted to replace the minuet with a scherzo (literally meaning “jest”), a playful, high-energy composition that offered greater room for drama and rhetoric. Price, however, saves the scherzo for later, instead writing her third movement as a Juba – an antebellum dance that included hopping, turning, hand-clapping, thigh-slapping and foot–stomping. It’s a romp, to be sure, but one nonetheless subject to Price’s deconstructivism. The opening melody is presented in pieces, tossed about from violins to woodwinds to trumpets, then punctuated by percussion and plucked strings. Still, there is relief and joy in the pure fun of the dance.
At the center of this fragmented dance, the music finally gives way to continuity in the most striking and stylistically specific moment of the symphony. In stark contrast to the fragmented music heard thus far, this dusky middle section features long, sinuous, uninterrupted melodies played by the English horn and trumpet. These are built upon a repeating bass figure plucked out by the cellos, providing stability and groove. Its sound world seems to draw directly from the 1920’s and ’30’s “Jungle style” of Duke Ellington – especially from songs like “The Mooche,” “Mood Indigo” and “Echoes of Harlem.” Fast-forward to 1962, and Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine” seems a near-perfect echo of Price’s Juba, almost 20 years after the symphony’s premiere.
Once again, socio-historic interpretation is difficult to avoid. The Cotton Club, where Ellington’s “Jungle style” was popularized, was both a platform for black musicians and an all-white venue that romanticized plantation life, and therefore slavery, to entertain its patrons. Perhaps the use of a solo English horn, the quintessential pastorale instrument, is Price’s means of connecting the cotton fields to the Cotton Club. Perhaps this section is simultaneously a tribute to Ellington – whose music Price drew from explicitly in other works – and a calling out of the institution in which his “Jungle style” was popularized. Or, perhaps this is all too much extra-musical meaning to be laid upon Price’s music. Either way, it stands out as the only theme in the entire work that is presented in its entirety by a single instrument, not fragmented between instruments or otherwise interrupted. It is a singular moment of musical rhetoric at the very heart of the symphony.
IV. Scherzo
The final movement is a scherzo proper, and its unfettered energy bursts forth from the first measures. Again, a scherzo’s conventional place is in the third movement of a symphony, so perhaps Price is deconstructing even on this largest of scales. What is certain is the restlessness and relentlessness of the music – its persistent chromaticism, off-kilter rhythms, and juxtaposition of light dances, bold marches, fanfares and frenzied passagework. Fragmentation is everywhere. Where conventional, European symphonism might call for a triumphant, or at least resolved, conclusion, Price instead builds the fragmentation and tension of all four movements into an explosive and positively frenetic ending. The finale in some ways ties the symphony together – recalling the first movement’s military marches, the second movements woodwind solos, and the Juba’s playful dances. Yet it does so in fragments, one quickly following the other. If in the Juba we had found light-hearted joy and a calm center, the finale troubles the waters once again, and thrillingly so.
We leave at once unsettled and energized by Price’s Fourth Symphony. We also stand in awe of a composer whose work was forgotten for so long, whose voice is so unique and powerful, and whose music has so much to say. It’s time we listened.
