New recording and performance video on a musical birthday
My recording of Florence Price's Fantasie nègre finally sees the light of day
This is one of those listening-heavy posts, so I recommend clicking through to view this in your browser, or just be resigned to clicking on the embedded videos which won't work in email; it's your life.
Today’s newsletter is a choose-your-own-adventure situation: you can read the TL;DR version below and click through and be done with it, or you can read all my thoughts and then click through and be done with it. It’s up to you!
The TL;DR Version
My recording of Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 1 in E Minor is out today! Not only can you listen to it on the streaming service of your choice (Apple Music, Spotify, or other platforms) or download it on iTunes, there is also an official performance video!
And yes, this is the same work I performed on my programs in June if you were at any of those performances, and it is the same work that has sent me on a long scholarly journey with an investigative detour.
Please listen/watch and, if you are so inclined, share! Recording and filming of the Fantasie nègre was funded in part by this newsletter, so if you at any point have chipped in, you have had a hand in making this happen. Feel free to show this off and take credit for it as a Patron of the Arts, I give you permission.
The long version
First of all, the reason why I’m releasing this recording today and not some other time this year is because September 3 happens to be the 95th birthday of this very special piece of music.
That’s right, we have a birthday today!!!!!
On September 3, 1930 in Chicago, a seventeen-year-old Margaret Bonds premiered “A Negro Phantasy” by a not-a-huge-deal-yet composer named Florence B. Price. The work was noted as “a most effective piano composition” and foreshadowed not only the future Fantasies for piano to come—the second of which I released a recording of earlier this year—but also of grander works that would cement Price, however precariously, in history.
Two years after this premiere, Price would win the Wanamaker Competition’s first prize for her Symphony No. 1 (also in E Minor!) which would be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, making Florence Price the first African-American woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.
I also wasn’t being poetic when I said the Fantasie nègre No. 1 foreshadowed pieces like her symphonies; I was being completely, totally literal.
Around the 3:42 mark in my video, there’s a lovely lilting melody:
And if you hit play on the second movement of Price’s Symphony No. 4, you’ll hear…the exact same melody. Like, verbatim. The first time I heard this movement I did a double take.
What a delightful little Easter egg of a connection between pieces! It reminds me of how Beethoven would recycle melodies in his works—I love it when composers steal from themselves. (Also, that melody is too good to use only once.)
But I kind of jumped ahead there. The main theme of the Fantasie nègre No. 1 isn’t an original melody that Price came up with; she used the spiritual “Sinner Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” which you can hear Jessye Norman singing here:
It’s a gorgeous melody and what made me fall head-over-heels in love with the Fantasie nègre was what Price does with it. The first time Price gives us the theme it’s alluringly simple, shimmering in a haze of smoke and memory, and then over the course of the Fantasie she gives us the theme again and again only she ups the ante each time—both in drama and technical demand. It’s dastardly and Franz Liszt is somewhere applauding because game recognizes game.
In fact, when I first heard Samantha Ege’s recording of it, my reaction was basically “Oh, now this is good. Wait, oh my god, THIS is good, there’s no way to top this—wait WHAT HOLY CRAP?!?!?”
In other words, the Fantasie nègre is basically this meme:
I am a serious music scholar.
Anyway. Please watch the video, if not out of your own interest then for the fact that filming cost extra and we (me and all the lovely people who pay for this newsletter) would all like to get our money’s worth.
And listen to the track on your streaming platform of choice! (Or buy it on iTunes! Enjoy, tell your friends, etc.
And thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have followed along and supported me in many a fashion for however long you've been on this ride with me. Truly I could not do any of this without you. 🎹
Congratulations on the release, it’s lovely!
Since you wrote about the recording and editing process before (https://buttondown.com/doodlyroses/archive/on-platonic-ideals-and-pauses/), I’m curious how the video version was made. Do the video clips correspond directly to the different audio takes, and someone (hopefully software) kept track of which video tracks should be used as the audio was edited? Or is the video more like a separate product, and it mainly matches the audio by virtue of your consistent playing (perhaps helped with some cuts to wide shots, or the camera inside the piano where your hands aren’t visible, whenever there was a mismatch)? :)
This is a fantastic question that I want to answer in lots of nerdy detail; I was going to type it all out and then realized that I owe you mail, so I am writing my answer out by hand and physically mailing it to you. You can expect to receive an answer in however long it takes mail services to transport a letter overseas. :D
Sorry, now I noticed you wrote about this particular recording session in one of the posts linked from the other one (https://buttondown.com/doodlyroses/archive/on-fuss-and-awkward-feelings/), so that partially answers my question :D