DIVE IN!
Florence Price’s tone poem for orchestra, The Oak, is a deliciously dark and thoughtful expression that draws on Price’s southern American Roots cultural heritage as much as her classically European style training. It sounds at once stylistically traditional to the late 1800s while being thoroughly infused with early / mid 1900’s melodic and harmonic material — this weaving that reflects the essential American voice of classical music. Enjoy getting to know more about this powerfully moving piece and its inspirational composer, and have a great time listening!
RESOURCES
A great 3 minute biography video produced by the Portland Maine Symphony about Florence Price that will whet your appetite for more research!
The only complete recording of The Oak available on the internet .
An excerpt of The Oak recorded live in 2018
PODCAST ALERT!
Join Jessica Joy on her podcast Classical Queens, as she shares her research of forgotten women who have done much to contribute to America’s musical identity. See their lives unfold, understand their musical impact, and then consider with me, the ways their stories could still impact our current communities. These are the stories of Black women in classical music who have been slayin’, seen and unseen, for hundreds of years. I hope you tune in for this bi-weekly podcast.
HIGHLIGHTS
Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. As a composer, she was most active during her time living in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953.
Price found great success even as she endured and persevered through a lifetime of difficulty within the American classical music field as a woman of African heritage. Not surprisingly her greatest success was among the cultural powerhouse circles of both the Chicago and Harlem Renaissance. This was in stark contrast to her ability to be taken seriously by Eurocentric classical music gatekeepers, as evidenced by her determined and yet heartbreaking letter to famed mid 20th century Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitsky, excerpted here.
Despite being very nearly shut out of the American cultural spotlight Florence Price composed some 300 works for large and small ensembles, including art songs sung by Marian Anderson at her historic 1939 Lincoln Memorial performance.
Florence Price composed The Oak in 1943 at the age of 56. Although Price was an accomplished, celebrated, and well known composer this particular piece of music was neither published nor performed in her lifetime. The first performance of The Oak was given at MIT by the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra in June, 2019 led by conductor Cynthia Woods. It has subsequently received no less than 16 additional performances! The Oak is a single movement symphonic poem and is about 12 minutes long.
Price’s score calls for 3 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and the usual string section of violins, violas, cellos and basses.
LISTENING MAP
Use this listening map to guide you through the piece. Read it in advance or while you’re listening!
The first notes we hear are low, soft, and slow. This builds through the orchestra, moving in and out of fleeting moments of harmonic tension with a hopeful brightness settling in from the violins and French horns. Shivering sounds in the string section bring us back to the possibly foreboding opening material and we once again find ourselves wandering in a dark forest of tangled harmonies. Soon enough though we enter into a more rhythmically energized forward moving section that suggests we’re finally on our way toward hopeful sounds again. A beautiful lush melody in the and woodwinds sets us on a path to comforting rich harmonies with a satisfying trumpet melody. Then things get really tumultuous for another few moments with the addition of heavier brass and low strings, before finding our way back to the lush harmonies of the strings and an active harp. Just as suddenly as the light came, we are back to the shivering strings and darker brooding sounds. From there we cycle through some of those initial moods, almost like a return to the first few scenes of a story in a main character’s memory sequence. This bursts forth into a brassy and insistent building up of the entire orchestra, underscored by a march like use of snare drum as the piece makes its way to a showy ending.
NERD ASSIGNMENTS
Consider & Discuss!
Symphonic music based on an idea or a story is a frequently used device from which to build a composition. In some cases a composer will include specific references or notes to indicate what they had in mind. Florence Price titled this piece The Oak, but no written notes exist that help us know what, if any, specific story or other extra musical element she might have intended. As you listen to this moody and somewhat volatile work, note what you hear in the music that is evocative of the title. What sounds or movement in the music might underscore The Oak in a literal or metaphorical sense? Now that you’ve learned a bit about Florence Price, what might you imagine she could’ve intended from her personal context?
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