Barber, Price, and Beethoven – Connecting the Pieces
Dalton M. Guin
Within the context of a literate musical tradition – that is, any musical tradition that uses markings and representational symbols on paper to convey instructions to performers as to what sounds to produce and how – every performance carries with it also a significant aspect of composition itself. Although the tangible artifact – the “sheet music” – may have been created by a composer alone, performers must interpret these works and realize them in the medium of sound. As part of that realization, each musician brings to bear their own various individualities. Years of individual training and practice, of joy and despair, of love and grief are all brought to bear in the realization of this written music as sound. Resultingly, each performer joins together with the composer in realizing a work, some ineffable part of each performer is contributed to the work as a whole, and all are joined together in the act of creation.
With this idea, the role of the listener (audience) is also challenged. If the life and experiences of the performers have an undeniable effect on a musical work’s performance, don’t the life and experiences of each listener also have meaning? While trained musicians may be well-versed in performance practices and biographical specifics of a composer’s life and works, the casual listener may have no such body of knowledge on which to build their understanding or comprehension of a piece. In joining together consciously with the composer’s known intentions and the specifics of the context in which they composed, a more richly rewarding and musically satisfying experience can be shared between all three entities – composer, performer, and listener.
Adagio for strings, Op. 11 (1936) – Samuel Barber (1910 – 1981)
Samuel Barber’s 1936 orchestration of Adagio for strings is one such piece that resonates today as resoundingly as it did nearly a century ago, because of this shared understanding of its core – grief. Adagio has been embraced by every media that has existed since its composition, from live performance to radio, from film to television, and from record sales to the internet. Performers and audiences around the world have recognized something in this work that is indicative of some aspect of the archetypal human experience. To better understand the impact and reception of this work, one must examine its mechanics, cultural adoptions of the work, and the composer himself.
First, what is Barber’s Adagio? Originally the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, also composed in 1936, Barber recognized that this movement had the quality to stand alone, and reorchestrated it for string orchestra. Adagio is 69 bars in B-flat minor, orchestrated for violins, viola, violoncello, and double bass. Violin I introduces the main 17-note melody, traversing the ascent of a diminished fifth through a series of steps interrupted by descending skips before ultimately arriving only a major second above the starting pitch. This painfully slow ascent over warm sustained chords in the lower strings that are themselves reticent in their progression set the landscape for the piece in the first four measures. A breath of rest allows the moment its own space, before the violins resume their wandering progress (Figure 1).
Structure
Briefly in measure 11, a momentary tonicization of the minor Dominant is suggested over a long A-flat pedal, with a fifth leap in the first violins echoed by an octave leap in the second violins (Figure 2). This moment of longing is followed by the progression of the minor Dominant immediately becoming diminished, before the lower-voiced violas take over the original step-skip melody, again taking 17 notes to ascend the distance of a major second. This unfulfilled moment – leaping up in a Dominant area and not being given the satisfaction of a Dominant to Tonic resolution – is the crux of this work’s unrealized search, and that sought-but-unobtained moment of release is perhaps mechanically at the heart of Adagio’s emotional resonance. This moment, having been established in measure 11, is emulated twice more (in measures 22 and 38-39), ultimately covering a wider interval each time, becoming increasingly more desperate in its search for resolution that remains unfulfilled.
The climax of the work occurs at the upper limits of violins, violas, and cellos’ registers, sustaining a bright, piercing F-flat major chord (Figure 3). This moment of brightness is no resolved resting place. There is no comfort in its duration; it does not belong in the context of B-flat major, is not modulatory, and does not resolve to something that does or is. The moment is evocative of red-rimmed eyes, raw from countless tears, being blinded by the light of day, receiving no solace from the cold and indifferent sun. A pause again, recalling the moment after the melody’s initial introduction (measure 5) – perhaps a long, shaking breath between sobs – and the melody’s slow, searching progress continues on in a recapitulation that fades away to end on an F major chord, solidifying its lack of resolution by ending on the major Dominant of B-flat minor instead of returning to the Tonic and providing any sense of closure or completion.
History
Barber’s Adagio was premiered by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Radio Orchestra in 1938. It was broadcast at the announcement of the deaths of both Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945) and John F. Kennedy (1963). In 1982, the work was performed at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco and has been used internationally to memorialize the victims of terror attacks and the Coronavirus pandemic. Barber himself requested the work not be performed at his funeral, and didn’t believe it was his greatest work, wishing instead that other works were performed more and found greater popularity.1
Adagio for strings is famously used as the theme for the 1986 Vietnam War film Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone. The film, based on Stone’s own experience as a US Army Infantryman in the war, grapples with both individual morality and societal morality. It shows the stark, grim realities of the war in Vietnam, and explores the overwhelming grief that such a radical level of destruction and human loss leave in its wake.
Adagio paired with these scenes and the questions of morality and loss resonated with an American populace exhausted by war. In the United States, the war in Vietnam was beset by grief from every side. With one 1995 investigation by Hirschman, Preston, and Vu placing the death toll in Vietnam at up to 1.14 million between American and Vietnamese military and civilians, the enormous loss of life left people emotionally raw and ready for grief.
In his book “The Saddest Music Ever Written,” music theorist Thomas Larson explores his relationship with Adagio through the lens of his own family history, using that history to examine the unbroken space that the work has occupied culturally since its composition. In it, he asserts that “Barber assigned no such correspondence for his work. In fact, in writing a slow movement for a string quartet, it’s almost certain he had no extramusical vision for what the Adagio would become: that is, after its initial contexts – between 1938 and 1945 – the piece attached itself to meanings Barber could not have foreseen…”2 If this association with grief and loss were not Barber’s overt intentions when composing Adagio, mustn’t some deep-seated personal sadness still have been imbued by the composer’s own experience to receive such universal recognition?
Composer
Samuel Barber was born into an upper class family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1910. His mother was a pianist, his aunt a leading contralto in the Metropolitan Opera, and his uncle a composer. His aunt and uncle would act as early advocates for Barber’s musical training and education, and he would keep close council with his uncle until the latter’s death in 1953. Samuel Barber was the second student admitted into the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he would study for a decade and where he met his future partner and best friend. By his early 20s, Barber was a successful, happy composer who spent his summers in Europe, taking composition lessons and himself composing. From where, then could the sorrow that is at the core of the Adagio have come?
Biographers disagree as to the root of Baber’s sorrow, but Thomas Larson notes that his contemporaries agreed that great melancholy was at his core. Some biographers, Larson suggests, claim that Barber’s repressed existence in the “seemliness” of Puritanical West Chester could have had a significant impact on his dark melancholy. Other biographers, Nathan Broder among them, make a case that Barber’s homosexuality and his necessarily closeted life in West Chester were the source of his great melancholy, and how he could conceive of and compose such a haunting search for resolution.
Logically, Larson’s assertion that Barber could not have intended such a universal attachment to Adagio when he penned it in his string quartet must be true. Whatever moving, melancholic sadness the composer felt his work conveyed, he never could have imagined that it would be adopted as America’s unofficial national song of mourning, and his own frustrations with the work’s popularity indicate that he never intended it to have the cultural power it has gained since its premiere. With its use in media to convey sadness and emotional desolation, its occasional parodies to poke fun at the same, and its universal adoption as one of the preeminent sounds of sorrow, listeners have attached layer upon layer of import to Adagio over time. As the work has been embraced ever more broadly, and accumulated nearly a century of contextual associations, strains possibility now that it can be heard without the impact of all its extramusical associations. Performers, then, as critical facilitators between composer and listener, can hardly claim a performance that is merely the recreation of Barber’s ink on the page. All three parties – composer, performer, and listener – coalesce to create something richer, fuller, and more powerful than what the composer alone composed, resulting in an experience that transcends the boundaries of any single contingent party and is greater than the simple sum of its parts.
Dances in the Canebrakes (1953) – Florence B. Price (1888 – 1953)
Although Barber provided some sparing but specific comment on his Adagio, not every composer has such a documented opinion of their works. Florence Price’s Dances in the Canebrakes is not accompanied by such opinion. If one wishes a more complete idea of Price’s intention in composing this work, one must examine the biography and catalogue of the composer to further situate this work within the context of its time and role in American music.
Structure3
Dances is a suite consisting of three dance episodes titled 1. Nimble Feet, 2. Tropical Noon, and 3. Silk Hat and Walking Cane. Each movement is essentially in ABA form, with the first two movements ending in substantial codas. The first movement is a rag, the second a drag, and the third a cakewalk, all dance styles that were associated with American Ragtime at the start of the 20th Century.4
After a two-bar introduction, “Nimble Feet” begins with a cheery four bar melody layered across strings and winds, marked Allegro (Figure 4). This melody is passed around the orchestra in tight compound rhythms until the second theme is introduced in measure 35 in the violoncellos (Figure 5). This second, more lyrical theme is rhythmically simpler than the first and presented in E-minor, providing the opportunity for upper voices to ornament the section with syncopated rhythms that recall the complexity of the first theme and tie the movement together.
“Tropical Noon” begins with a two-bar preamble that mirrors the introduction of “Nimble Feet.” This introductory moment serves to shift the rhythmic feel and key shift of the new movement (from “Nimble’s” E-major to “Tropical’s” A-major). The tonal shift pairs with the tempo change from Allegro in “Nimble Feet” to Andantino in “Tropical Noon” to create a sense of arrival and rest, movement of a fifth suggesting Dominant to Tonic motion and making the second movement seem like the logical harmonic goal of the first (Figure 6). This feeling of arrival is paired with a lyrical, languid melody introduced by piccolo and clarinets, reinforcing the harmonic relationship between A-major and E-major and evoking a relaxed, sumptuous dalliance at midday under the tropical summer sun.
“Silk Hat and Walking Cane,” marked Moderato and in F-major, leaps into its melody straight away, unlike its preceding movements (Figure 7). The violins take command of the melody line, and winds offer bright, dancing ornamentation. Interlocking lines across the orchestration echo the complexity of the first movement, and the unified and familiar voicings tie the entire suite together.
History, American Music in the Early 20th Century, and Florence Price
In early publications of Dances, publishers quote Price as describing it being influenced by “authentic Negro rhythms.” Indeed, the first theme of “Nimble Feet” (measures 3-4) does not really resemble the conventions of Price’s European predecessors (Figure 8). Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was a particular inspiration to Price. Writing in the New York Herald in 1893, Dvořák maintained that any American school of music must “strike its roots deeply into its own soil” and embrace the music of “negros” and indigenous peoples.5
A composer concerned with nationalistic ideas of musical composition himself, Dvořák’s own Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 and Op. 72 are interesting comparisons to Price’s own Dances. Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances are two collections of 16 tunes inspired by dance styles native to the composer’s homeland of Bohemia. Like Price, Dvořák’s Dances do not directly quote Bohemian folk tunes, but are original compositions written in the same style as folk music that was familiar to him. The form of Dvořák’s Dances is as simple and straightforward as the folk music on which it is based, with the composer seeking to codify what were considered lower-class folk traditions into more upper-class and “serious” repertoire. Also like Price, Dvořák’s works were also originally composed and released for piano, before others convinced the composer to orchestrate the works for full symphonic orchestra.6
In drawing on the thoroughly European style of composition on which his relevant folk music was based, Dvořák’s work draws its primary interest in larger, structural moments. Of particular interest is his writing of furiants, a form noted for its rapid shifts between double and triple meters that includes characteristic hemiolas of the double and triple meters being set atop each other in energizing and off-kilter syncopations (Figure 9). Dvořák uses furiants frequently in his compositions, including twice in his Slavonic Dances; in his Symphony No. 6 in D Major, Op. 60; and in his Czech Suite.
Price’s Dances, in contrast, rely more heavily on localized syncopation that on larger, structural moments of offset. What Price may have meant in her being inspired by “authentic Negro rhythms” can likely be observed in her repeated use of small, localized syncopations to create a steady feeling of continuity and rhythm. Price used these rhythms to create the melodic frameworks within Dances, not just as rhythmic accompaniment to generate motion within the work.7 Set side by side with Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances it is apparent that Price’s work draws on a different set of traditions altogether.
While Price’s Dances may draw on different source inspiration for content, her approach is both apparent and familiar. The form of her works is based on traditions of Scott Joplin’s Ragtime and the dance craze of the early 20th Century,8 but she still follows that structure in the same way composers like Dvořák and Brahms do in their own folk-music suites. Unlike Percy Grainger, Gustav Holst, and other more Anglo-centric composers who pursued extant folk music to document and include in their works, in Dances in the Canebrakes, Price emulated the practice of many Germanic- and Slavic-centric composers in seeking to elevate the style of vernacular folk music to the high regard of the concert stage. While Price’s works do include a great many settings of spirituals and folk tunes, this effort to compose her own entirely original contribution is in keeping with the traditions of the most “serious” European composers.
Price’s position as an African-American woman in the United States in the early 20th Century ensured that she would face barriers to success that her white and male contemporaries did not. Though she was born in integrated Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1888 to a dentist father and pianist mother, she would live through the social transition from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era. In her first year at the New England Conservatory in 1902, Price listed her race as “Mexican” and her hometown as “Pueblo, Mexico.”9 Price is never documented as having hidden her race or origins again, and Price biographer Rae Linda Brown suggests that this initial obfuscation was at the behest of Price’s mother, who was worried about her reception as an African American woman at the time.
By all accounts, Price’s upper middle-class situation within society and the respect her family enjoyed in Little Rock situated her well to pursue music. She obtained positions at universities in both Atlanta, GA, and later in Chicago, IL. She worked with successful African American artists such as Margaret Bonds, Langston Hughes, and Marian Anderson. The critical event that led to Price’s relocation from Little Rock to Chicago was the horrific lynching of an African American named John Carter in 1927. Her musical output, social circles, and very existence were all ineffably permeated with her existence as an African American.
Price’s works reflect this aspect of her identity deeply. In addition to several arrangements of spirituals such as “My soul’s been anchored in de Lord,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho,” and “Trouble done come my way,” Price also composed works that were evocative of both the working class experience many post-Reconstruction African Americans were familiar with, like “Dance of the Cotton Blossoms” and “Memories of Dixieland,” as well as works that were reflective of popular African American musical trends such as “Arkansas Jitter” and “Bayou Dance.” Her more politically-motivated works, among them the solo vocal setting of Hughes’ “Monologue for the Working Class” and her orchestral work “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” all show her dedication to using her unique position as an African American woman composing music for a concert setting to push forward the cause of representation and equality.
Taken in light of the many works that she composed with African American folk themes and messages, Price’s overarching intention to gain her own acceptance and provide a musical voice within a context dominated overwhelmingly white, male, Euro-centric composers is evident. Her collaborations with other African American musicians and artists contributed to the formation of a community of creatives who sought to give voice to a mostly unheard people in the high-brow venue of the concert stage. But how do modern listeners contribute to contemporary productions of Price’s works?
The American Civil War concluded a mere 23 years before Florence Price’s birth. The rending of American society and the struggles that each generation before her faced was readily present in national consciousness at the time. Federal policies of Reconstruction and a sharp regression to Jim Crow segregation meant that social wounds – and the generational trauma brought along with them – would have been fresh pain within daily society. In spite of her talent and work, Price’s education and success stand out as exceptional rather than obvious. During the course of Price’s life, American society doubled down on the division of races with harsh segregation laws that would have further reinforced views that any African American was a lower-class citizen than their white counterparts, and that any art they made was of intrinsically lower quality and value.
With such a racialized social climate, grandiose archetypal humanist themes were not widely assigned to Price’s works as they were to something like Barber’s Adagio. With such a break between the time Dances in the Canebrakes was composed and premiered and its recent resurgence in popularity today, there aren’t numerous extramusical stimuli that are included in a listener’s experience of the work. Price’s employment of rhythmic techniques has, in the years since her death, become prevalent in popular music of most genres. The National Museum of African American History & Culture discusses the impact Black music has had on sacred music, the Blues, Rock and Roll, Country Western, Hip Hop, and other genres. This prevalence of rhythmically-driven musical traditions in American popular culture might mean that works like Price’s Dances seem less exceptional to the casual listener. But knowing Florence Price’s context in history, and that much of her compositional style is an early influence on bringing this musical paradigm onto the concert stage makes it all the more rewarding as a listening experience.
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800) – Ludwig van Beethoven, (1770 – 1827)
Born more than a century before either Florence Price or Samuel Barber, and living and working entirely on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from the previous two American composers, there are many additional challenges to situating Beethoven’s works within the shared space between composer, performer, and listener. Thankfully for this purpose, Beethoven remains one of the best-researched composers within the Western European musical tradition, and his monolithic position within the traditions of orchestral music are well-documented.
Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770 in the city of Bonn. His father, desperate to have a prodigy that could compete with the fame of Amadeus Mozart, misrepresented young Beethoven’s age on his first performance program, claiming he was a child of six instead of seven. Beethoven, the third generation of successful musicians in the city of Bonn, was under this constant pressure to live up to (and ideally surpass) the accomplishments of his contemporaries. After Mozart’s early death in 1791, a young Beethoven began studying with Joseph Haydn, another German symphonist after whom Beethoven would base his own compositional style.
The term “symphony” has a long history dating back to the 14th Century, but is used commonly today to describe a thoroughly developed work.10 The symphony was the ultimate compositional expression of the 18th Century in German music. Mozart almost certainly composed over 40 symphonies in his short life,11 while Haydn composed 106.12 Beethoven would ultimately complete 9 symphonies, although he sketched many ideas that he considered for symphonic incorporation, and had significant sketches of a tenth when he died in 1827. He is largely revered within Western European traditions as having reached the pinnacle of symphonic expression, with a crisis arising amongst composers after Beethoven’s death as to how to continue exploring the medium of symphonic expression.
Although Beethoven produced far fewer symphonies than either Mozart or Haydn, his approach to the medium set him apart. While Mozart’s symphonies were in three movements nearly as often as they were in four, with the exception of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 which is comprised of five movements, Beethoven’s symphonies maintain a standard of four movements. In basic terms, they are constructed by a quick first movement, a slow second movement, a quick third movement based on a scherzo (a deviation from Mozart and Haydn’s affinity for the menuet dance), and a quick finale that returns to the original key of the first movement (with the exception of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, which end on their relative minor and major, respectively). This more standardized and rigid formal structure was popular with Beethoven’s contemporary audiences. Instead of unexpected variations in form, Beethoven would turn to other variances in dynamics and harmonic progressions to frustrate and excite listeners’ expectations.
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)
Although Hector Berlioz suggests that this symphony is the one that least captures Beethoven’s unique compositional style, and sees the composer emulating much of Mozart’s own style, seeds of what Beethoven would later produce are still present in the first of his symphonies.13 Not only are Beethoven’s signature sudden dynamic surprises present from the outset and accompanied by a clear fondness for sforzandi, his long-range vision can also be found.
The introduction, twelve bars marked Adagio molto, are surprising series of chords that defies harmonic identification. The very first resolution – a C7 to F – suggests a tonality of F major (Figure 10). The next three measures center around G7, perhaps suggesting a stronger relationship to C major, but without a firm V-I cadence, there can be no certainty. It is not until a brief moment of V-I motion from measures 7-8 that C major is truly suggested as the tonic key14, and not until the start of the work’s primary theme in measure 13 (marked Allegro con brio) that C major tonality is well and truly confirmed. This harmonic obfuscation, replete with surprise dynamic shifts (measure 3), serve to build tension and interest until the listener can be whisked away by the primary theme that answers – at least initially – the harmonic question.
In the second movement, marked Andante cantabile con moto, Beethoven plays with fugal writing, although the movement is firmly still in classical sonata form. The second violins begin the melody, and the movement is off to 199 measures of layering and variation of that theme. The movement is in F major, which relationship to C give it the impression of a place of rest and repose, the movement of V-I (C-F) suggesting a logical harmonic progression that conveys a sense of inevitability in tonal music that is build around the harmonic construct of a cadence.
The third movement is a departure from the traditions of Mozart and Haydn. Both earlier composers often used a menuet as the quick dance movement in their works. Beethoven, indeed, marks the title of this movement as Menuetto, but marks its tempo as Allegro molto e vivace. In 1817, Beethoven notates a tempo of 108 bars per minute. There is no doubt that Beethoven envisioned this movement as anything but fast, and it truly becomes a scherzo when performed at Beethoven’s tempo. This menuetto nod to the practices of his predecessors would be recognizable as part of the symphonic practice to anyone who had the music in front of them or had access to a program, but the sound of this movement’s quick jumps and starts would have been an exciting surprise for listeners who expected to hear a traditional menuet.
The Finale begins with a halting Adagio introduction executed by the first violins. Hesitant scalar lines cross almost the expanse of an octave in the first five bars, teasing the listener with an uncertainty and seeming hesitation to embark on the journey of the final movement. After a long, suspenseful fermata in measure six, Beethoven marks the primary theme as Allegro molto e vivace again, and the first violins race away. Unlike the harmonic obfuscation in the first movement’s introduction, the finale’s introduction outlines the Dominant of C major (without turning F into F-sharp, keeping it firmly rooted in the key of C major), and C major is reinforced repeatedly in the violoncellos and contrabasses for the first five measures of the primary theme. Solidifying the work’s tonality and standing as a clear contrast to the first movement’s moments of ambiguity, Beethoven ends the symphony with a joyous repeated reinforcement of C major. The similarity of this movement’s primary theme with that of the fourth movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 in G Major is also undeniable, another imbedded tribute to Beethoven’s forebears while still declaring his own agency and ability.
Morris Edmund suggests that Beethoven’s premiere performance was a success, and indeed, he was received warmly throughout the rest of his career.15 Berlioz claims the presentation of Beethoven’s works in Paris some years later was met with strong opposition by the musical elite, however. In the introduction to his “A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies,” Berlioz maintains that the “men of taste” in Paris had Beethoven’s works cut and represented differently than the composer had written them, finding them crude and unsuitable for French tastes. Berlioz notes how the casual listener – not the educated musicians – grew more voracious appetites for Beethoven’s music, recognizing in it something that they enjoyed and demanding its performance more and more. Ultimately, Berlioz states, Beethoven would become the preeminent composer in French musical thought that he was throughout the rest of Europe.
Beethoven’s music not being regularly presented in Paris until the occasion discussed by Berlioz, some half a century after the former’s death, presents a fascinating opportunity to examine the reception of Beethoven’s music by the layperson, the casual listener. Preceding his works, the music of Mozart and Haydn would have had more time to circulate throughout Europe. In a time before recordings or convenient long-distance travel, geographic location was everything. With Paris and the court at Versailles long considered a cultural epicenter in Europe, locals might not have had much incentive to try and explore musical traditions outside their own borders. The musical elite – those learned musicians whose reputations were tied at least in part to the primacy of the Paris school and French superiority – would have likewise lacked significant incentive to introduce foreign works into their repertoire. That Berlioz suggests a vocal “minority” of musicians in Paris agitated for the performances of Beethoven’s works is itself a reflection of its quality. That audiences were presented with “edited” versions of his works and increasingly demanded more until they were consuming Beethoven’s music alongside that of their native composers, despite all efforts of the French elite to exclude Beethoven from their programs, is a compelling endorsement of his music’s worth.
Composers can make any number of attempts to guide their music’s reception and replication. Aside from the basic compositional mechanics that determine how a piece sounds, the way the composer presents and markets their work and the way they speak and write about it can all have significant impacts on its reception. As an examination of Barber’s Adagio and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major shows, however, the composer cannot entirely dictate how their work will be received. In Barber’s case, mediums arose alongside his young work and kept it relevant for nearly a century, reinforcing extramusical attachments to the work that the composer himself lamented. In the reception of Beethoven’s Symphony in the elitist music halls of Paris, the successes of Beethoven’s complete body of works (recalling that this was half a century after his death) in his homeland and throughout greater Europe could not shift the levers of power on their own, but resonated so strongly with the casual listener that the Parisian masters were forced to acquiesce.
Florence Price’s Dances in the Canebrakes is an exemplar of a work’s life devoid of active influence or promotion by the composer. William Grant Still recognized some worth in Price’s piano work, and arranged it for orchestra. Audiences today are generations removed from the origins of Price’s “authentic Negro rhythms,” from the weight of Jim Crow era segregation, and from the overt struggles Price had to face simply to exist in her field. And yet, all of these things still have an impact on our current American culture. The rhythms of early African American music permeate every modern American music today, every year the United States is faced with the reality of its structural basis on race and class inequality, and women are still not proportionately represented within the structures of power within American society. Knowing Price’s own history, and the history of America, is it possible to trace those threads through works like Dances in the Canebrakes and not feel a deep-rooted connection to a shared identity as human beings?
A composer’s intentions might be singular; there is only one “them,” and they have lived a singular life. Listeners, too, have lived a singular life. But as the plurality of the word “listeners” implies, each of those singular listeners will have a different experience at experiencing the same performance of a work of music. Just as a composer brings their experience to the composing, listeners bring theirs to the listening. With each performance of a work, with new listeners and new performers each time, a new, intangible work is created. A shared moment occurs and is experienced simultaneously together and separately; the injunctions of “individual” are transcended, and for however brief a moment, the most beautiful unity occurs.