Hello, and welcome to our very first music bubble blog post! We decided that in the midst of recording episodes, we would release a weekly blog post about anything music related. If you have any ideas or want us to talk about something in particular, do not hesitate to email us or drop us a line on our website. We’d be so happy to hear from you!
In honor of International Women’s Day which took place on March 8th we’d like to dedicate the topic of this blog post to the wonderful music of Florence Price. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, Price was a music teacher, composer, pianist, and organist. She published her first composition when she was eleven years old and studied organ performance and piano pedagogy at the New England Conservatory. In 1933 she became the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra in the United States: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, which was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Symphony No. 1 combines elements of Classical music tradition and aspects of Black American culture at the time such as the Juba Dance (a type of dance that involves tapping and stomping) and the use of pentatonic scales (a scale consisting of five notes). Despite the fact that Price composed more than 300 pieces, her works became largely forgotten after her death in 1953.
That is, until 2009 when her works were rediscovered in the attic of one of her former residences. Since then there has been a resurgence in her compositions, with musicologists and theorists analyzing and putting together the pieces found in her old home. There is now an archive for Price’s work at the University of Arkansas and musicologist Samantha Ege has spent the past two years in the archive attempting to put some of Price’s solo piano works back together. There was one piece in particular, the Fantasie Nègre No 3 in F Minor, that abruptly ended after two pages. Ege knew that there were pages missing and so she set out to find them. At first it was challenging as the piece begins in F minor, but the second page ends in the key of A-flat major. Ege assumed that the piece would return to F minor and so she looked for loose pages of scores in that key, but then realized that perhaps Price had more to say in the key of A-flat major. Samantha Ege then found what she believed to be the missing pages of the Fantasie in a box on a shelf in the archive. Putting the piece together, Ege wrote that playing it felt magical.
To read more about Florence Price and Samatha Ege’s discovery and work, and to listen to the Fantasie Nègre No 3 in F Minor, please see this article:
We hope you enjoyed this blog post and do not worry, because there will be one every week, published on Sundays! Once again, happy belated International Women’s Day! If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to reach out.
The Music Bubble.
This is really interesting! Speaking on International Women's Day, it would be really interesting to see the aliases that female composers had to use. I am working on a Schumann cello concerto which of course has Robert's name on it, but good chunks of the work were written by Clara! I also find it festinating that pieces are uncovered in attics cover in dust. Makes me wonder what other compositions are waiting to be rediscovered.