Florence Price sneak peek
Dispatches from the Imperfection Lab
Hello hello and sorry for the extended hiatus on audio/video posts!
I’m in the middle of the editing process for the pieces by Florence Price, Maria Szymanowska, and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel that I recorded earlier this year in the studio. How I feel about these tracks varies wildly day to day, but I wanted to give you a lil sneak peek of how things are sounding!
Here’s the latest version of the track for Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G minor. There are three tiny issues I’ve asked the engineer to see if he can fix, but overall I’m fairly happy with it.
One little thing giving me pause—which I have no control over, and it is what it is—is that after I made this recording, in which I was as faithful to the score as I could possibly be, I heard that scholars have been very frustrated with the sloppiness of the current published editions of Price’s music. Apparently there are errors and suspect editing decisions all over the place.
When I listened to other (very respected) pianists’ recordings of this Fantasie, I heard pretty big discrepancies between what they were playing and what I had in my score, and I opted to religiously follow the score I had and figure that I was just contributing my version to the body of recorded work. It bothers me immensely to find out that maybe my score is just full-on wrong, so as part of this process I’ve just had to practice acceptance; until I have more information, I don’t know what’s “right” or “wrong,” but what I do know is that I did my damndest to make something beautiful and cohesive out of the music I was given, which is still so beautiful it gives me chills when I play it.