By Alan Sherrod

Ihave to admit that prior to February 2017 my knowledge of Florence Price and her music was that of her name on a list of American women composers. In my shaky defense to never having heard a live performance of her music until then, or even a recording, I can say that I wasn’t totally alone even among those who write about the subject. This comes despite the fact that she has been cataloged as one of the first African-American classical-music composers to gain a wide-spread reputation. There is a point here worth absorbing.

In that month of February 2017, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performed Price’s Dances In the Canebrakes (arranged and orchestrated by William Grant Still from Price’s original work for piano) on a Masterworks concert conducted by guest Mei-Ann Chen. In my Knoxville Mercury review of that concert, I offered that “the work owes its delightful atmosphere and addictive rhythmical flights to Price’s original piano work and its enticing instrumental color to Still’s orchestration…”)

Since that time, Price’s name has come up again and again in various media contexts and I was aware that KSO maestro Aram Demirjian had programmed a Price Piano Concerto for his closing concert of the orchestra’s 2017-2018 season. One of those mentions came from music writer Alex Ross in The New Yorker this past February.

“ The reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find. In a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced herself thus: “My dear Dr. 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.” She plainly saw these factors as obstacles to her career, because she then spoke of Koussevitzky “knowing the worst.” Indeed, she had a difficult time making headway in a culture that defined composers as white, male, and dead. One prominent conductor took up her cause—Frederick Stock, the German-born music director of the Chicago Symphony—but most others ignored her, Koussevitzky included. Only in the past couple of decades have Price’s major works begun to receive recordings and performances, and these are still infrequent.” –Alex Ross, The New Yorker, February 5, 2018

Price (born Florence Beatrice Smith in 1887) hailed from Little Rock, Arkansas, getting her first music training from her music-teacher mother. Graduating from high school at age 16, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving degrees in organ performance and in piano education. After Boston, she returned to Little Rock, later marrying attorney Thomas Jewel Price in 1912.

With racial tensions in the South growing worse in the years following World War I, Price and her family moved to Chicago in 1927 where she found increased musical opportunities in additional studies and by establishing herself as a teacher and organist. Her first published work (by G. Schirmer in 1928) was At the Cotton Gin. Her major work, the Symphony in E Minor, was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductor Frederick Stock in June of 1933, the first time an African-American woman had had a work performed by a major symphony orchestra.

Following the CSO’s premiere of Price’s symphony, Stock encouraged her to compose a piano concerto. Although her Concerto in One Movement was performed at the Chicago World’s Fair, most of the score was later lost. Trevor Weston of Drew University was commissioned by the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago to reconstruct the piece which has subsequently been made available for performances.

In this week’s KSO Masterworks—a concert of works by American composers— pianist Michelle Cann will perform the Price concerto. She will also perform George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work whose familiar energy, driving momentum, and melodic magnetism should be a perfect send-off for the final concert of the season.

The KSO is teaming up with the Clarence Brown Theatre for their opening production of the 2018-19 season, Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. That production is slated for a run from August 29 – September 16. As a preview, Maestro Demirjian and the orchestra will open this week’s Masterworks concert with the Overture to Candide.

The KSO is going big for its closing work on the program, Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for a premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1946, the work features triple woodwinds, four trumpets, piano, two harps, and lots of percussion effects. One can almost hear those cozy moments of woodwind texture contrasted with major pronouncements, one of which is the theme that is familiar as his Fanfare For the Common Man. Short of marching onstage to receive a diploma to the strains of Elgar, one would be pressed to cite a more appropriate work to end a season.

Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks Concert: “Rhapsody in Blue”

Conductor: Aram Demirjian

• Leonard Bernstein: Overture to Candide

• Florence Price: Piano Concerto (Pianist Michelle Cann)

• Gershwin: Rhapsody In Blue (Pianist Michelle Cann)

• Copland: Symphony No. 3

Tennessee Theatre, 604 S. Gay Street, Downtown Knoxville

Thursday and Friday, May 17 and 18, 7:30 PM

Tickets and Information