Composer Florence Price. I heard a performance of Florence Price’s Piano Quintet in A Minor the other day, and very much enjoyed it.
But such has not always been the outcome of my encounters with her music. When I first heard of her, a few years ago, I listened to her Symphony No 1, and I thought the piece was a very strange thing. Indeed, I felt uncomfortable with its derivative style that owes so much to Dvořàk and other 19th century European composers (with some superficial African-American touches thrown in). How, I thought, could this piece possibly have been composed in 1936 – the same year in which Edgard Varèse wrote his Density 21.5 for solo flute?
And when I encountered the opinion (often found in program notes and reviews) that her music was suppressed because she was a woman of colour, I thought, “No doubt, that didn’t help. But there’s obviously a much bigger problem than race and gender prejudice at work here: her blatant rejection of her own Zeitgeist!” In other words, I dismissed Price’s music as anachronistic and “chronologically incorrect.”
The idea that the most admirable composers are the ones who boldly press forward into new aesthetic territory – such as Monteverdi, Beethoven and Debussy, to name just three – has deep roots in the culture of classical music. And according to this view of music history, any composer who doesn’t contribute significantly to “musical progress” is a lesser artist.
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that, like all Ex Cathedra orthodoxies, the artistic and even moral imperative to “make it new” (in the words of Ezra Pound) could do with a little examination.
It occurred to me that, taken to extremes, this belief-system makes it impossible to judge the artistic value of any piece of music without knowing when it was written. And this kind of thinking can lead to dubious conclusions.
Imagine, for example, that you have just turned on a radio and are listening to a piece of music already in progress. And imagine also that a] you like the piece, but b] you don’t recognize it, and c] based on your perceptions of musical history, you strongly suspect it was written by a contemporary of Beethoven, about 200 years ago. Yet, when the music ends, the radio announcer says that it was written quite recently. How would you react to this surprising information? Would you change your mind and decide that you actually don’t like the piece?
I submit that many people would be honest enough with themselves to acknowledge that, even though they are surprised by the date of composition, they still like the piece. And I also submit that any listeners who manage to reverse their initial favourable opinion because they believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with music that “doesn’t belong to its time” have elevated an ideology over personal authenticity. Simply put, they are lying to themselves.
With these thoughts in mind, when I found myself in a concert hall about to listen to Price’s Piano Quintet, I made a little promise to myself. I resolved to ignore the date of the work’s composition, and ask myself how I would feel about it if I had no idea when it was written.
And it made a difference! What I heard was a elegant and sophisticated work of art, full of invention and dramatic impact. (And, I might add, its African-American influences are more successfully integrated into the European idiom than in her First Symphony.)
At this point, gentle reader, you might think that I could tie this essay up in a neat bow with a conclusion like, “I now realize that it doesn’t matter when a piece was composed; only whether it’s good or not.” But in fact, my position is somewhat more complicated.
You see, I still see value in Pound’s admonition to “make it new.” And I think of it whenever I hear newly composed works that sound like they could have been written in the 1970s. Such pieces – they are not uncommon in the contemporary music world – often strike me as exercises in nostalgia for a bygone era. Composers who take this approach seem aesthetically stuck: as if they are tacitly acknowledging that the history of classical music is somehow “over.” Such “new” works are usually a disappointment to me. When I go to a new music concert, I want to hear something new.
I freely admit that I’m invoking a double-standard: it’s okay for a composer in the 1930s to embrace 19th-century Romanticism; but it’s not okay (with me) for a composer today to embrace the High Modernism of the mid-20th century. Yet I have my reasons, and I will try to explain.
Earlier, I cited Monteverdi, Beethoven and Debussy as composers much admired for breaking new musical ground. But I think it’s also useful to remember there’s at least one highly celebrated composer whose esteem doesn’t rest on his efforts to “advance” music. I’m talking about J.S. Bach – who was, in his day, widely dismissed as hopelessly out of date. For this reason (among others) his music was largely forgotten, after his death – only to be revived in a later era, when it no longer mattered that he was a musical dinosaur in his own time.
And this is the model I’m invoking when I consider Florence Price today. It may have mattered to the musical world, back in the 1930s, that she was behind the times. But that was then and this is now. To criticize her today for this would be like criticizing Bach for his old-fashioned-ness. And nobody does that.
Below, you’ll find a link to Florence Price’s Piano Quintet in A Minor.
© Colin Eatock 2024
But such has not always been the outcome of my encounters with her music. When I first heard of her, a few years ago, I listened to her Symphony No 1, and I thought the piece was a very strange thing. Indeed, I felt uncomfortable with its derivative style that owes so much to Dvořàk and other 19th century European composers (with some superficial African-American touches thrown in). How, I thought, could this piece possibly have been composed in 1936 – the same year in which Edgard Varèse wrote his Density 21.5 for solo flute?
And when I encountered the opinion (often found in program notes and reviews) that her music was suppressed because she was a woman of colour, I thought, “No doubt, that didn’t help. But there’s obviously a much bigger problem than race and gender prejudice at work here: her blatant rejection of her own Zeitgeist!” In other words, I dismissed Price’s music as anachronistic and “chronologically incorrect.”
The idea that the most admirable composers are the ones who boldly press forward into new aesthetic territory – such as Monteverdi, Beethoven and Debussy, to name just three – has deep roots in the culture of classical music. And according to this view of music history, any composer who doesn’t contribute significantly to “musical progress” is a lesser artist.
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that, like all Ex Cathedra orthodoxies, the artistic and even moral imperative to “make it new” (in the words of Ezra Pound) could do with a little examination.
It occurred to me that, taken to extremes, this belief-system makes it impossible to judge the artistic value of any piece of music without knowing when it was written. And this kind of thinking can lead to dubious conclusions.
Imagine, for example, that you have just turned on a radio and are listening to a piece of music already in progress. And imagine also that a] you like the piece, but b] you don’t recognize it, and c] based on your perceptions of musical history, you strongly suspect it was written by a contemporary of Beethoven, about 200 years ago. Yet, when the music ends, the radio announcer says that it was written quite recently. How would you react to this surprising information? Would you change your mind and decide that you actually don’t like the piece?
I submit that many people would be honest enough with themselves to acknowledge that, even though they are surprised by the date of composition, they still like the piece. And I also submit that any listeners who manage to reverse their initial favourable opinion because they believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with music that “doesn’t belong to its time” have elevated an ideology over personal authenticity. Simply put, they are lying to themselves.
With these thoughts in mind, when I found myself in a concert hall about to listen to Price’s Piano Quintet, I made a little promise to myself. I resolved to ignore the date of the work’s composition, and ask myself how I would feel about it if I had no idea when it was written.
And it made a difference! What I heard was a elegant and sophisticated work of art, full of invention and dramatic impact. (And, I might add, its African-American influences are more successfully integrated into the European idiom than in her First Symphony.)
At this point, gentle reader, you might think that I could tie this essay up in a neat bow with a conclusion like, “I now realize that it doesn’t matter when a piece was composed; only whether it’s good or not.” But in fact, my position is somewhat more complicated.
You see, I still see value in Pound’s admonition to “make it new.” And I think of it whenever I hear newly composed works that sound like they could have been written in the 1970s. Such pieces – they are not uncommon in the contemporary music world – often strike me as exercises in nostalgia for a bygone era. Composers who take this approach seem aesthetically stuck: as if they are tacitly acknowledging that the history of classical music is somehow “over.” Such “new” works are usually a disappointment to me. When I go to a new music concert, I want to hear something new.
I freely admit that I’m invoking a double-standard: it’s okay for a composer in the 1930s to embrace 19th-century Romanticism; but it’s not okay (with me) for a composer today to embrace the High Modernism of the mid-20th century. Yet I have my reasons, and I will try to explain.
Earlier, I cited Monteverdi, Beethoven and Debussy as composers much admired for breaking new musical ground. But I think it’s also useful to remember there’s at least one highly celebrated composer whose esteem doesn’t rest on his efforts to “advance” music. I’m talking about J.S. Bach – who was, in his day, widely dismissed as hopelessly out of date. For this reason (among others) his music was largely forgotten, after his death – only to be revived in a later era, when it no longer mattered that he was a musical dinosaur in his own time.
And this is the model I’m invoking when I consider Florence Price today. It may have mattered to the musical world, back in the 1930s, that she was behind the times. But that was then and this is now. To criticize her today for this would be like criticizing Bach for his old-fashioned-ness. And nobody does that.
Below, you’ll find a link to Florence Price’s Piano Quintet in A Minor.
© Colin Eatock 2024
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