CU Philharmonia honors Florence Price in newly imagined orchestration
I think a lot of things went into that, but I cant help but think racism and sexism and segregation were involved, says Assistant Director of Orchestral Studies and Instructor of Music Education Joel Schut. I think shes one of the great, underrated American composers and its time that she gets her voice fully heard.
Schut, who directs the CU Philharmonia Orchestra, is coordinating featuring a full orchestration of Seven Miniatures for Piano. The work comprises seven standalone piecespublished in An Album of Piano Pieces and Second Album of Piano Pieceseach of which reveals different facets of Prices creative personality. Seven CU Boulder student and alumni composers completed the orchestrations.
For this project, there was a strong interest among faculty, students, researchers and music-lovers to feature voices that have been silenced or overlooked in the past, Schut says.
Price, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, was a classical composer, organist and music teacher. But in so many ways, the heart and soul of her repertoire was piano, says Schut, so were trying to put that into a full orchestra context.
The program will begin with each of the seven piano pieces performed by seven different student pianists in the original setting that Price wrote them. Its really cool that all seven pianists are freshman students new to CU, Schut says. That will be followed by the 70-student Philharmonia Orchestra playing a newly imagined orchestration of those works complete with strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and harp. Were trying to see the work both as it was originally written and then also imagine it in a 2022 context, Schut says.
The idea to honor Price in this way actually came from a student, which I think is fabulous, Schut adds. What excites him most about that idea, he says, are the infinite possibilities.
A piano gives you the pitches and any detail that the composer chose to put in the score, but hearing it in three dimensions with many different timbres and textures and instruments and family groupingsthats just a whole other way to do the piece, he says. I really love it because it sparks students imaginations, and it forces them to listen in multiple directions and dimensions.
Prices history-making concert in 1933 was tainted by racism. Her first symphony only made it onto the Chicago Symphony Orchestra program because it was underwritten by Maude Roberts George, eventual national president of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Price once famously wrote: I have two handicaps: I am a woman and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Her work largely faded into obscurity after her death in 1953.
Schut says, Id like to think that audiences are anxious to hear things in 2022 differently than they would have in 1932.
This CU Philharmonia concert is part of a full weekend honoring diverse women composers.