Price, Brahms & Beethoven: May 16–18, 2025
- cbeeson69
- May 16
- 9 min read
Updated: May 17
Florence Price
Dances in the Canebrakes
DIVE IN!
Florence Price (1887-1953) is considered one of the first major African-American composers alongside other Harlem and Chicago renaissance era composers like Margaret Bonds, Julia Perry, Zenobia Powell, Undine Smith Moore, George Walker, and William Grant Still.
Early Life
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price showed an immediate interest in music, initially studying with her mother. She made her first public piano recital at the tender age of 4 and had her first compositions published at the age of 11. An extraordinary intellect and achiever, Price graduated high school at 14 as valedictorian and was admitted into the prestigious New England Conservatory in Boston at the age of 15. It’s worth mentioning that, at the time, NEC was one of the few dedicated music schools that would accept African American students. At NEC she studied piano, organ, and music education, she composed her first symphony, and graduated with honors in 1906 before returning to Arkansas to look for work as a music teacher.
Racism and Resolve
Price was blocked from teaching in white institutions but she did find success joining the faculty at Shorter College in Arkansas and later heading the music department at Clark Atlanta University, both very fine HBCUs. During this time her compositions were mostly shorter works for her students to perform.
In 1927 due to frightening escalations in racial violence Price and her family moved to Chicago. It was there that she returned to her composition studies and work. Price’s big break came in 1932 when she won first prize awards in the Wanamaker Competition for her Piano Sonata in E minor and her Symphony in E minor. The very next year a performance of that work by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made her the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Not long after this, Marian Anderson sang Price’s spiritual arrangement “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord” in her iconic and historic performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which really affirmed Price as a leading composer of her time.
Gatekeeping, and a Miraculous Turn of Events
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. Despite having, as she wrote “an accumulation of hundreds of unpublished and unsubmitted manuscripts”. These works could’ve been properly evaluated if only they would be programmed in public performances. In frustration, she advocated for herself directly in a 1943 letter to famed mid 1900s Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitsky, asking him to consider programming her work and writing “Unfortunately, the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, frothy, lacking in depth, logic, and virility. Add to that the incident of race—I have Colored blood in my veins—and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position” adding that she “would like to be judged on merit alone.” He neither responded nor programmed any of her works.
Price died ten years later in 1953, just before traveling to Paris to accept an award for her compositions. Due to lack of publication, limited performance history during her lifetime, and relatively little advocacy by others after her death she very nearly disappeared from memory. This, after composing over 300 pieces of music including large scale symphonic works, piano and violin concertos, chamber music, art songs, and numerous works for organ and solo piano.
But wait! There’s a twist ending!
A treasure trove of Florence Price’s manuscripts and papers were discovered in 2009 in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois that she had once rented. This house was in extreme disrepair and was being renovated by people who could’ve easily just swooped in and tossed it all in a dumpster. Instead these papers and manuscripts found their way to archivists at University of Arkansas and now, after all these years, Florence Price’s lost works have been published and are being performed internationally.
HIGHLIGHTS
Dances in the Canebrakes is the title for a set of three short dance pieces. They started their lives as solo piano works which Price composed in 1953 not long before she died. These 3 pieces were orchestrated posthumously by composer William Grant Still.
‘Canebrakes’ refers to a thicket of bamboo like vegetation which can be found in the southern United States. Various references can be found about enslaved people using canebrakes to hide in when escaping, or being forced to labor at clearcutting large sections of canebrakes to make fields for cotton and other crops. Dancing in the canebrakes then might bring to mind a sort of resistance act through the exercise of joy and personal agency.
Price gave each piece an evocative title to help listeners imagine themselves into the scene. The first dance, Nimble Feet, leans into ragtime rhythms. The second dance, Tropical Noon, brings a sense of hazy humidity with its so called “slow drag” dance rhythms. The third dance, Silk Hat and Walking Cane, is an homage to the “cake walk” traditional dance contest with its finery and strutting.
A typical performance lasts about 12 minutes.
Johannes Brahms
Double concerto in a minor, op. 102
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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid Romantic era. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of “The Three B’s” of classical music, a comment which has been attributed to the 19th century conductor Hans von Bülow who, let’s face it, probably wanted to be the fourth B…
The Facts:
A concerto is a structure that evolved from the Baroque era musical expression of a small orchestra of soloists within a larger orchestra of musicians as a means of making textural changes in a conversational kind of way. During the subsequent Classical and Romantic eras the concerto structure became more heroic, pitting a single instrumental soloist against a backdrop of a supporting orchestra. As this evolution continued through the Romantic era and into the 1900s we see the use of the orchestra grow into more of a conversational partner than a backup band to the solo instrument. This latest evolution was certainly beginning to take shape in 1887 when Brahms composed the double concerto. No concerto for solo violin and cello with orchestra had been composed at this scale before. It was also to be Brahms’ final major orchestral work.
Brahms composed the Double Concerto with the standard three movement Fast-Slow-Fast structure, beginning with Allegro (up tempo), then Andante (strolling tempo), and finally Vivace non troppo (quick but not too much).
The orchestra is scored for a typical size early Romantic compliment of woodwinds in pairs, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.
A typical performance lasts about 35 minutes.
The Tea:
Brahms had composed his only violin concerto for his then good friend and exceptionally influential violinist Joseph Joachim in 1878. Shortly after the premieres Joachim, a notoriously intense person, cut his friendship with Brahms as a consequence of Brahms siding with Joachim’s wife Amalie after Joachim divorced her over a false claim of infidelity. Messy stuff for sure. A decade or so later, Brahms decided to explore the idea of composing a cello concerto for his good friend and colleague Robert Hausmann. However, [DRAMATIC FOREBODING MUSIC] Hausmann was a major chamber music colleague of Joachim. Had Brahms dedicated a new work to Hausmann it might’ve driven even more of a wedge between Brahms and Joachim. So he did what all our Kindergarten teachers told us - he made enough for everyone! The Double Concerto then became an act of redemption for their friendship.
Okay but wait a sec…
Brahms uses a special 3 note motive A-E-F, which is a version of Joachim’s personal motive F-A-E standing for Frei aber einsam ("free but lonely”). Brahms had used the F-A-E ‘free but lonely’ motive in a sonata he composed for Joachim 3 decades earlier. This seems intentional, like a respectful callback to happier times in their friendship. BUT COULD IT BE A PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE SNEAK ATTACK COMMENT ON JOACHIM’S DECISION TO DIVORCE AMALIE??? 😲😲😲
The Juicy Nerd Stuff:
The A-E-F version of the “free but lonely” motto is eerily similar to the opening notes of the “I’m So Ronery” melody sung by Trey Parker as Kim Jong Il in the satirical South Park movie “Team America: WORLD POLICE”. Coincidence? YOU BE THE JUDGE. 🤣🧐🤓
The Goods:
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 2
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer of the late Classical and early Romantic stylistic eras. He is one of the most influential composers of western European classical music and remains a household name to this day regardless of whether people have listened to his music even one time. He completed his Symphony No. 2 in 1802 when he was 32 years old and beginning to come to terms with his increasing hearing loss. It was a very difficult and dark time for him. Regardless, this piece of music belies all that with it’s charming melodies and vigorous rhythms.
Back story and highlights
Beethoven’s compositional output and style straddled the last Classical and early Romantic eras. His works are generally split into early, middle, and late periods. Symphony No. 2 is considered to be last major work of his early period as he begins pushing boundaries and leading stylistic changes away from the Classical era into the Romantic era. One signal of this evolution is evident in his choice to compose a Scherzo movement instead of the more traditional Minuet. Both are derived from dance forms but the Scherzo is much more energetic and lively than the Minuet.
This inclusion of more energetic, playful, and generally positive sounding music underscores Beethoven’s commitment to go on creating despite feeling exceptionally despondent about his hearing loss. In an effort to find relief and possible cure his hearing, Beethoven left Vienna for the relatively quiet countryside location of Heiligenstadt where he spent the summer and into fall with no improvement and in fact some worsening. It was here that he began working on Symphony No. 2 in earnest. Owing to the fact that he wrote a painful and emotional letter to his brothers from there we may never have known the circumstances against which he was composing this jubilant work.
This letter has come to be called the Heiligenstadt Testament. Here are a few excerpts:
Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was ever inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for 6 years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless doctors, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years, or perhaps be impossible). Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to withdraw myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, “Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.”
Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.
Oh I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. . . I must live almost alone like an exile.
Thus it has been during the last six months which I have spent in the country. By ordering me to spare my hearing as much as possible, my intelligent doctor almost fell in with my own present frame of mind, though sometimes I ran counter to it by yielding to my desire for companionship. But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I would have ended my life.
It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence — truly wretched for so susceptible a body that a sudden change can plunge me from the best into the worst of states.
When Symphony No. 2 was premiered it had mixed reviews. A bit backhanded at the outset, calling it “bizarre, harsh, and undisciplined”, this review leaves no doubt that Beethoven had accomplished something spectacular despite his intensely troubled emotional state: “This impression is so far overcome by the powerful, fiery spirit which is felt in this colossal work, by the wealth of new ideas and the almost total originality of their treatment, and by the profound knowledge of the principles of art that this symphony will be heard with ever-increasing pleasure when a thousand celebrated fashionable pieces of today have long since gone to their graves.”
Symphony No. 2 is in 4 movements: Adagio-Allegro (slow introduction, then up tempo), Larghetto (a bit slow), Scherzo: Allegro (up tempo dance), and Allegro molto (very up tempo).
It is scored for a typical Classical era sized orchestra of winds and brass in pairs, timpani, and strings.
A typical performance lasts about 35 minutes.
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