Ravinia 2023 Issue 5

Florence Price and her eldest daughter, Florence Louise Price Robinson, (above) tend the garden at their Saint Anne, IL, home where, decades later, papers and musical manuscripts by the composer would be rescued from the then overgrown and damaged building (right) and entrusted to the University of Arkansas for preservation. UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION (PRICE); TIM NUTT/UAMS LIBRARY HISTORICAL RESEARCH CENTER (HOUSE) artist. Sometimes things happen very slowly, sometimes they happen very quickly. I think that had a lot to do with the piano music being out there, because people were hearing it on the radio or on streaming services. There was a pretty quick expansion of the awareness of Florence Price. Of course, major orchestras playing her music has been hugely important too.” Indeed, Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director emeritus Riccardo Muti led a performance of Price’s Third Symphony in 2022 that was so well received, he is spotlight- ing it on the CSO’s European tour in January 2024. His final concert as music director at Millennium Park in late June also included music by Price. These performances were an overdue homecoming of sorts since then-CSO music director Frederick Stock led the landmark performance of Price’s First Symphony in 1933. “I play the Piano Concerto a lot,” says Downes. “It is really fascinating to experience the response from au- diences. ‘Where has this been?’ ‘How come I had to wait 50 years of my life to hear it?’ It’s awesome. It’s in one movement and travels this incredible musical and emotional range in 15 minutes that leave audiences jumping out of their seats. It’s really great. “When I put out Florence Price pi- ano music recordings, I released them digitally only because it was during the pandemic and I self-released the recordings. At that time, now three years ago, I could not find a major label that was interested in the music of Florence Price. This was not a big, fancy release. I recorded the music, it got distributed, it was playing on the radio and on streaming services. And not a week goes by that I don’t hear from somebody through the contact info on my website, through social media, saying ‘Oh, I heard this piece on Spotify or my local station. And I loved it. Do you know where I can get the sheet music?’ ” Is there a particular quality that Downes finds unique about the music of Price that attracts such reactions? “If you look at the time that she was writing, her music is represen- tative of a whole thing that didn’t happen in America in music. It might have happened based on Dvořák’s vision and his message about creating ‘an American music’ that would be based on this kind of source materi- al. We’d have this aesthetic and this mission at its heart. As we know, it didn’t really catch on for all kinds of complicated American reasons. “Here’s the thing, and I always come back to this in my head: it’s the 1930s and here’s this Black woman who had huge ambition. She wanted the Boston Symphony to be play- ing her music and is sending them scores and sending music around. She’s conservatory trained and so easily could have written music that sounded like white male music of the time, right? She had the background and the skill to do it. The fact that she is insisting on using these melodies, these rhythms, this tradition, it’s very courageous. It is incredibly authentic and American, but probably, in the end, didn’t help her all that much at the time.” What did Downes have to do to get works that were found in an open attic playable and performable? “Michael [Cooper] went down to Arkansas and started going through these boxes. Luckily, her manuscripts are very clean. Aside from the damage to the paper, he was able to pretty clearly read what she intended. And then we worked together on the editing process—he would send a first draft to me and I would play through it. ‘Maybe she meant an F here instead of an A?’ And we’d talk about it. “When it came to performance ideas, dynamics and shaping and all that, we were able to work it out together. Some were quite open to interpretation because it looked like she didn’t have a lot of time and may- be she didn’t have a lot of paper. And so instead of writing the A section out again after the B section, she was constantly writing da capo [from the top] even in little piano pieces! You’re flipping back and forth. There was a lot of shorthand.” “ Dozens and dozens of piano pieces [were found;] I started learning them and recording them on the spot. … There was a pretty quick expansion of the awareness of Florence Price. I think that had a lot to do with the piano music being out there. ” RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 27, 2023 12