Music Teacher - Sheet Music review: Florence Price: Rediscovered Gems for Piano Solo

The music of the pioneering African American composer Florence Price (1887–1953) has enjoyed a surge of interest over the past decade as academics, performers, promoters and publishers belatedly bring underrepresented voices into the classical music mainstream. Price herself was the first to acknowledge that her path to acceptance would not be an easy one when she wrote to conductor Serge Koussevitsky (in 1943): ‘I have two handicaps – those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have Negro blood in my veins.’

That Price triumphed despite these barriers is testament to her talent and dedication to music. Nor were they the only major challenges she faced. Married twice, Price divorced her first husband after he repeatedly abused her, then separated from her second husband to raise two young daughters alone, supporting them by playing the organ for silent films and composing radio songs. She also ended up estranged from her mother, who chose to identify as White and cut all family ties after her own remarriage – a personal tragedy recorded in Price's poignant song ‘Brown Arms (To Mother)’.

Price's mother was her first music teacher and supported her early successes: she made her debut as a performer aged 4 and had her first composition published at 11. She went on to study organ and piano teaching at Boston's New England Conservatory, then briefly ran the music department at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia. Following her marriage to attorney Thomas J. Price in 1912, she returned to her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent the next 15 years there composing, teaching and starting a family.

In 1927 the Deep South's segregation laws and rising tide of racial violence prompted the Price family to move to Chicago, and it was here that her career really started to take off. She became a key figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance movement, through which dozens of leading African American cultural voices rose to prominence, including the blues, jazz and gospel musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson. In 1932, Price became the first Black woman to have a piece played by a leading American orchestra when the Boston Symphony premiered her Symphony in E minor, and two years later she was the soloist for the premiere of her critically acclaimed Piano Concerto in D minor.

It's clear from the concerto and Price's other major solo piano works – such as her four Fantasies nègres – that she was a superb keyboard technician. As a result, everything she wrote for the instrument falls naturally under the hand while being melodious and incorporating references to jazz, blues and spirituals.

The present collection spans her career from the 1920s to 50s and includes a delightful selection of character pieces that look back to the Romantics, in particular Dvorák and Grieg.

These pieces were nearly lost to history. They come from a haul of dozens of manuscripts by Price that were discovered in Illinois in 2009, boxed up in an old house being prepared for renovation. Now held by the University of Arkansas, they are published here for the first time in a handsome new 64-page edition by Price scholar and pianist Michael Clark, whose detailed critical notes about each piece are available to download via a QR code. The cover of the edition features a picture by the first Black painter of still lives, Charles Ethan Porter (1847–1923).

Clark explains how Price always tried to give her pieces descriptive titles to make them more marketable, but that she took a flexible approach to this naming process, ‘often brainstorming alternatives in the margins of her manuscripts’. Clark has applied editorial discretion in cases where Price suggested multiple titles, and given generic names to untitled pieces. Price's hand-crossing and fingering suggestions have also been included, along with a few helpful editorial markings. The result is an evocative journey through Price's wide-ranging musical language in 25 miniatures of progressive difficulty, from elementary to intermediate.

Right from the off, Price engages the player with carefully crafted technical and musical challenges. ‘Sailing through Clouds’ opens with a four-note figure split between the hands that leads to a flowing waltz theme in C major, nicely contrasted with a middle section in F where the melody moves to the left hand. This is followed by a playful ‘Scherzetto’ that follows the same key structure (C-F-C), with echoes of ragtime in the outer panels. ‘Absence’ is a schmaltzy number from later in Price's career that calls for some deft hand-crossings, while ‘Far Afield’ is the simplest of tunes that could have come straight from Grieg's Lyric Pieces.

The next group of four pieces forms a mini-collection dubbed ‘In Summer Fields’, with each movement evoking a different aspect of bucolic life: ‘Beside a Quiet Lake’, ‘Sunset’, ‘Daisies: Waltz’ and ‘Field Mice’. All conjure vivid images, with the hymn-like quality of ‘Sunset’ pointing to Price's experience as an organist. ‘When Dusk Falls’ continues the twilight mood with a nod in the direction of the spiritual.

The technical challenges pick up from ‘On the Top of a Tree’, whose freewheeling character passes material back and forth between the hands as well as making use of the piano's upper register. ‘A Sprite Kissed a Rose’ has a decidedly wry quality with a lovely middle section that puts the theme in the tenor, while ‘Longing for Home’ calls for some resonant pedalling in D flat major. Next, we are transported to Ireland with ‘A Wee Bit of Erin’, then back to more homely images with a pair of pieces from the incomplete collection On My Mantelshelf.

The first of the ‘Forest Scenes’ recalls the hypnotic minor-key exoticism of Satie's Gnossienne No. 3, the second carries us straight back to the world of the Romantics, and the third revels in dreamy impressionism. ‘Dainty Feet’ and ‘Rocking Chair’ are as rhythmically suggestive as their titles, while the figuration in ‘The Mill’ would be at home in a German Lied accompaniment. Beautiful melodic writing with rich accompaniments characterise ‘Romance’, ‘Happy in Shadows’ and ‘Southern Sketches’ – all of which feature handfuls of octave chords – and the collection comes to a moving close with the open-hearted ‘Rhapsody’.

This is an exceptional selection of vivid and attractive pieces which will delight and challenge players of all ages while shining a spotlight on an important figure in 20th-century music whose works deserve to be better known. Highly recommended.