by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12:00 pm, organist Jonathan Moyer presents this week’s program of the Tuesday Noon Organ Plus Concerts. Moyer, who is the Church of the Covenant’s primary organist, is also an assistant professor at Oberlin Conservatory.
If you can’t make it to University Circle in person, you can listen to the live stream here.
INTERESTING READ:
Should the Met stage all their operas in English? Absolutely, argues John McWhorter in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “Many opera fans object to translation on the grounds that composers set the music to the words carefully, according to the accent patterns and vowel colors of the language in question,” he writes. But “opera is better when you can understand it.”
Needless to say, this article has generated plenty of debate in the comments — there are almost 250 of them. Form your own opinion by giving those and McWhorter’s article a read here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
On this date in 1953, African American composer Florence Price died in Chicago at the age of 69, leaving behind a legacy of some 300 works. Dozens of her scores escaped destruction when they were discovered in 2009 in an abandoned house in St. Anne, IL.
Born in 1887, Price grew up as Florence Beatrice Smith in the integrated city of Little Rock, Arkansas, just a few houses away from William Grant Still. She attended the New England Conservatory in Boston, originally enrolling as a piano and organ major, but she later convinced conservatory director George Whitefield Chadwick to take her on as a composition student.
Returning to Little Rock, she married attorney Thomas J. Price in 1912, and after racial tensions flared up in her hometown, moved to Chicago with her husband and two daughters in 1927. There, she won the Wanamaker Competition for her first symphony, which was debuted by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony in 1933 on a concert of music by black composers during the World’s Fair.
Price’s life and career have been captured in The Caged Bird, a 57-minute documentary produced in 2015 by the University of Arkansas. “Price’s remarkable achievements during the racist ‘Jim Crow’ era were a testament to her gifts. This is the inspiring story of one woman’s triumph over prejudice and preconceptions.” Watch a 15-minute excerpt here (a DVD is available for purchase).
Click here to listen to a 2011 performance of her Symphony No. 1 in e by the New Black Repertory Ensemble, led by Leslie B. Dummer. And here to watch a video of Price’s Symphony No, 3 in c played by the Yale Symphony Orchestra in 2016 under Toshiyuki Shimada.
