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Dances in the Canebrakes |
Composed: 1953 For solo piano; posthumously orchestrated by William Grant Still. Estimated length: |
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Born on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas; Died on June 3, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois |
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First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work for a Classical series concert. |
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Florence Price produced not only symphonies, concertos, and other orchestral works but also chamber compositions, many pieces for solo piano and organ, and choral music. She was a prolific composer of art songs as well and made arresting arrangements of spirituals. Yet a vast portion of her music remained unpublished, languishing in neglect after her death at the age of 66. Racism and gender inequality had made this extraordinarily accomplished artist into what the musicologist Rae Linda Brown calls an “Invisible Woman” in The Heart of a Woman, the first-ever biography of the composer.
Born Florence Beatrice Smith in the Reconstruction South of 1887, she studied organ, piano, and composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Years later, Price never received a response when she sent her music to the attention of the BostonSymphony’s music director, Serge Koussevitzky, a major gatekeeper of the new music scene.
In 1927, during the Great Migration, Price resettled in Chicago and lived there until she died in 1953, the year she wrote Dances in the Canebrakes as a suite for solo piano. Her contemporary William Grant Still, Jr., another prominent African American composer overdue for rediscovery, orchestrated the pieces posthumously.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Dances in the Canebrakes comprises three treatments of what Price described as “authentic Negro rhythms.” All three pieces include a contrasting middle section. Price overlays a distinctive harmonic voice on her folk material, giving characterful titles to each piece. “Canebrakes” refer to the dense thickets of sugarcane in the Deep South that slaves were ordered to work—and that also served at times as a place of refuge for people who escaped enslavement.
Nimble Feet plays with the kind of rhythmic syncopation Scott Joplin had explored around the turn of the century in his pioneering ragtime piano compositions. A slower, more inward-looking mood dominates in Tropical Noon, with its slow-drag and tango rhythms. The fancy attire evoked by Silk Hat and Walking Cane alludes to what Brown calls “the grace and spirit of the cakewalk, a favorite antebellum dance” in which couples “pranced around in high-step, each couple hoping to win the coveted prize cake.”
Scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, alto saxophone, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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