By Dr. John Koegel | Professor of Musicology, California State University, Fullerto
Florence Price (1888-1953), née Smith, became the first African American woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony conducted by Frederick Stock performed her Symphony in E Minor in 1933. She reportedly wrote more than 300 compositions—for orchestra (four symphonies, several concertos for violin and for piano, and other orchestral genres), for her main instruments of piano and organ, as well as for chorus, solo voice (art songs and spiritual arrangements), and chamber ensembles. Although she achieved acclaim for her compositions during her lifetime, after her death her music was generally forgotten, and many of her works were long thought to have been lost. However, in recent years there has been great interest in her work, and numerous performances of her orchestral music have been given and recordings released by ensembles such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Women’s Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New Jersey Symphony, Arkansas Philharmonic, and others. Her art songs and piano works are also increasingly being edited, published, performed, and recorded.
The Price renaissance has been sparked by these and other developments. In 2009, a large group of her previously hidden unpublished manuscript musical scores was found in her disused former summer home in Illinois. They are now in the Price Collection at the University of Arkansas, alongside other works and materials donated previously by her family. Insightful articles on Price have appeared recently in the New York Times, New Yorker, and other leading public forums, and the late Rae Linda Brown’s long-awaited magisterial biography, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, was posthumously published in 2020. Samantha Ege, Douglas Shadle, Michael Cooper, and other music scholars are studying Price’s life, music, and legacy; are editing her work for publication; and are discovering important new information that enriches and corrects our current knowledge and verifies her important status in American national musical life.
Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a middle-class family (her father was the city’s first Black dentist), and she first studied music with her mother. She studied composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston with Frederick Shepherd Converse, and privately with George Chadwick (1854-1931), one of the most prominent American composers of his time and Director of the New England Conservatory. After earning the Artist Diploma in Organ and the Piano Teacher’s Diploma in 1907 she returned home to Little Rock.
Because the all-white Arkansas Music Teacher Association refused to admit her, she founded the Little Rock Club of Musicians and taught music in Little Rock’s segregated Black schools, including its Shorter College (1907-1910); she later moved to Atlanta to teach at Clark College (1910-1912). After returning to Little Rock again she married, and in 1927 moved to Chicago, where she studied at the American Conservatory and Chicago Musical College and began to win awards for her compositions. A prolific song composer, she set texts by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and other Black poets, and her art songs and spiritual arrangements were performed by leading African American performers, such as contralto Marian Anderson, and later soprano Leontyne Price. Anderson closed her famous 1939 concert given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. with Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord,” and she reportedly performed that arrangement more than 100 times. Anderson also sang Price’s art song “Songs to the Dark Virgin,” setting the poetry of Langston Hughes. The Chicago Daily News hailed Price’s work as “one of the greatest immediate successes ever won by an American song.”
Price’s large-scale works are often conservative in style, in accordance with the late-Romantic nationalist ideals of the early twentieth century, but she was also in tune with the artistic ideas of the Harlem Renaissance. In some of her works she explored the use of pentatonicism and the call and response technique so important in Black traditions. She utilized quotations and paraphrases of Black spirituals in some of her works, especially in her piano music, and her compositions mix classical European stylistic techniques and harmonies with rhythmic elements and melodic ideas derived from her African American heritage.
For her choral-orchestral work Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, Price set Vachel Lindsay’s 1914 anti-war poem Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois). Lindsay (1879-1931) was one of the prominent American poets of his time and intended his poetry to be sung or chanted, as he himself did during his extensive poetry performance tours around the country. He grew up in Springfield, Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln, and scholars note that Lindsay’s poem is similar to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in that both works express the belief that the living must complete the work of the dead. Lindsay’s evocative poem and Price’s monumental and masterful fugue that ends her beautiful musical setting of the poem pose the important ending question: “and who will bring white peace again?” (Price repeats it musically numerous times.) The “white peace” (paix blanche) mentioned at the end of the poem refers to a peace treaty that allows the warring nations to return to their pre-war status and same territories without change or punitive action. Lindsay’s poem suggests that Lincoln will not rest until nations stop waging war and allow peace and freedom to reign—a sentiment that surely resonated with Price, who saw at first-hand the effects of racial intolerance and hatred.
Price was so moved by Lindsay’s anti-war poem that she left three versions of Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight: one for orchestra, piano and organ, vocal soloists, and chorus; a second version for chorus and vocal soloists with piano accompaniment; and a third, incomplete version for large orchestra consisting of the introduction and part of the Overture. (The Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony will perform the first version.) The work opens with a brief vocal solo followed by a lengthy instrumental Overture, in different sections and in three-part ABA form. Eight stanzas of Lindsay’s poem are divided into six musical movements, each with its own character. Price writes very well for the voice, for both the soloists and chorus, and emphasizes transparent musical textures in the orchestra, rarely having the full orchestra and chorus perform at the same time. She has the chorus sing unaccompanied on particularly significant moments in the poem. Her dramatic ending fugue, with its important emphasis on the need for peace without reprisal, is the most musically substantial section of the work and brings it to a moving conclusion.
Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) completed his famous Missa in angustiis, frequently called the “Nelson Mass,” in 53 days in July and August of 1798 for the name day of Princess Maria Esterházy, the wife of his patron Nicholas II, Prince Esterházy. The composer himself performed the organ part at the premiere given in the parish church in Eisenstadt, the site of the Esterházy palace. The third of his six late great masses written between 1796 and 1802, it is one of his best-known large-scale choral-orchestral works, after his oratorio The Creation. The title Missa in angustiis literally means Mass in the Time of Narrow or Mass in Straitened Times, but might also be translated as Mass in Time of Distress, reflecting the economic difficulties and political strife and violence during the Napoleonic Wars. Also referred to as the Imperial or Coronation Mass, it is popularly known as the “Nelson Mass,” in honor of British Admiral Horatio Nelson, the victor over the French at the Battle of the Nile in Egypt in 1798, who attended a performance of the work in Vienna on September 7, 1800. (The composer did not give it that name, however.)
Haydn’s prominent use of the orchestra in the “Nelson Mass” is connected to his experience with writing his last twelve, “London,” symphonies for his two trips to England in the 1790s (Symphonies Nos. 93-104, composed 1791-1795), although the symphonic character of his late masses should not be overemphasized. Haydn’s attendance at grand performances of Handel’s large-scale choral-orchestral works at Westminster Abbey during his English visits also influenced the composition of his late masses, especially in his careful balancing of instruments and solo and choral voices. He accomplished this in his late masses even though his orchestra for Prince Nicholas II only had between about 20 and 25 players and his chorus was similarly sized, in comparison to the giant forces used for the English Handel celebrations. The original instrumental ensemble for which Haydn wrote has been described as a “dark orchestra,” because it included only trumpets and timpani, strings, and organ. This reduced orchestration particularly reflects the more austere and troubled times during the Napoleonic Wars and may also relate to the title of the work, Missa in angustiis. Because of financial constraints, Prince Nicholas II had dismissed the members of his Harmonie—his wind players—and the trumpeters had to be hired specially for the premiere of the “Nelson Mass.” (The Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony will perform the expanded version of the “Nelson Mass” with added winds.)
Although they are frequently performed today as concert works, Haydn’s late masses were originally written to be performed as part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic mass. They are musical settings of the mass ordinary, the five sections of the liturgical service with invariable texts—the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. And as with many other large-scale masses, the composer set the sections of the mass ordinary with longer texts—especially the Gloria and Credo—in individual contrasting movements that musically represent and elaborate on the text of the mass.
Although they are highly esteemed today, Haydn’s late masses were generally ignored or underappreciated in the nineteenth century, in contrast to his instrumental music, and were viewed by some as too worldly in their use of secular forms to set the liturgical text of the mass ordinary. Indeed, one music critic wrote in 1844: “Haydn took the worldly (operatic) music of his period, put it in the church and made almost a concert hall out of the house of God.” Haydn valued his vocal music very highly, such that in public statements he expressed the regret that he had not written more music for voices. One of his contemporaries noted that “Now and then Haydn said that instead of so many quartets, sonatas, and symphonies, he should have written more vocal music, for he could have become one of the leading opera composers.”
In recent decades, many conductors and choral ensembles have embraced the late masses, and numerous recordings have been released, including those conducted by Leonard Bernstein, John Eliot Gardiner, David Willcocks, and others. Scholars such as Lawrence Schenbeck have endorsed Haydn’s “Nelson Mass” and have highlighted its “alternation of stark drama and expressive depth” and its “cheerfully tolerant eclecticism that unhesitatingly seats fugues in the same pew as theatrical arias.” Because of this eclectic mix of sacred and secular styles, elaborate vocal solos (especially for soprano and bass), the careful alternation between solo vocal and choral sections, the vocally inspired instrumental writing and emphasis on the orchestra as an essential partner in the musical fabric, the “Nelson Mass” can be considered as a compendium of compositional techniques of the time and a musical tour de force that movingly heightens the inherent drama of the liturgical service for which it was written.