Florence Price: A Celebration – Collaborations to Preserve Price’s Legacy
This semester’s faculty and staff spotlight recognizes Doug Shadle, Associate Professor of Musicology for Blair School of Music. He met with us to discuss his work on last semester’s Florence Price: A Celebration, the month-long festival honoring the music composed by Florence B. Price (1887 – 1953). Price is recognized as the first African American woman to earn international acclaim for her compositions and be performed by a major orchestra. In our discussion, Dr. Shadle examines how Vanderbilt’s culture of radical collaboration encouraged his pursuit of this project, partnering with local, national, and international talent to elevate some of Price’s never-before-performed pieces and showcase her versatility as a composer. The celebration was documented in videos available to Vanderbilt faculty and students for teaching purposes as well as by the photography of Nashville-based artist LeXander Bryant, which is on display at the Curb Center from February 9 through March 8.
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Campbell (Office for Arts, Libraries & Global Engagement): You are one of the leading authorities on Florence B. Price. Going back to the beginning, how did you first encounter Price’s work?
Douglas Shadle: I grew up in Price’s hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and had connections to her music through my music teachers. In Junior High, my orchestra director taught a unit on Arkansas musicians and included Price in that list amongst artists like Johnny Cash and William Grant Still. I don’t know how common that was. I think my orchestra director was special in that regard because in the late 80’s some Arkansas ensembles were trying to get her music out there, but in a smaller state with not a lot of resources, their work did not make as huge a splash as more recent efforts have.
The second part of the story is that when I was in graduate school, I focused on American composers who were not recognized in the canon of classical musicians. Since the founding of the United States, there have been composers writing great music that for one reason or another was less frequently performed. My first book, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, discusses this idea across the entire 1800s, and I view Price as the next part of that narrative as one of many composers in the early 20th century whose music was forgotten and is now being recovered.
CC: Florence Price’s life and music is currently receiving renewed interest. To what do you attribute this global renaissance?
DS: I think the most important reason for Price’s music receiving attention is that it is simply great music. Perhaps answering a different question but one of the ideas behind Florence Price: A Celebration was that we wanted to display the full range of Price’s compositional output. Her works that are getting attention are orchestral because ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, which everyone knows even if not invested in classical music, perform her music. However, Price wrote hundreds of pieces, each great in their own way, and we wanted to highlight different types and styles of music to better understand Price as a creative artist.
Price’s music is getting so much attention because people hear it and say, “Wow! This is great,” but then wonder why they’ve not already heard it. That is where the second root cause for its current attention comes in—the compelling backstory of her archive. She was relatively famous in her lifetime, but then her music fell into neglect. Some of that has to do with racial and gender discrimination, there is no secret about that, but the music’s neglect is also the practical issue of it physically being lost. A house containing many of her documents and sheet music was discovered in 2009. It was amazing! The house was a real mess, with water damage and a fallen tree atop it, but over in a corner, there were several boxes of Price’s handwritten music manuscripts, many including music that had never been performed before.
When the materials became available to the public in 2015, I was awarded a travel grant from the Provost’s Office to visit the University of Arkansas, where these materials eventually landed, and I was just blown away by the extent of it. This music was sitting in obscurity and could have been lost forever, so there has been a lot of effort to get this music into the public so that they can appreciate it. With this archive becoming available, it’s easier to make the case for Price, while in previous decades it was more difficult because much less music was available.
CC: How did you feel when it was discovered and made available? Is there an aspect of that collection that interested you most?
DS: The big questions that I enjoyed looking for were how her music relates to other music from the time and how she navigated the world in which she lived. One thing I like to say is her music cannot be pinned down. She was engaging with a lot of different streams of music and she also avoided some things. For example, you might assume that as an African American composer in the 1920-40s, she would be really into jazz, but she’s not jazzy. She wasn’t anti-Jazz, but she kind of avoided it. Exploring this musical world that she is living in and creating for herself has been the most interesting thing because it is unlike the standard narratives of music for the time. It opens other possibilities for understanding American music and culture.
CC: Please speak on your experience producing Florence Price: A Celebration. When did the planning begin? And what were your aspirations for the program?
DS: Vanderbilt put on its first big performance of Price’s music in the fall of 2018. This performance focused on our local talent in its collaborations and student involvement. We collaborated with Patrick Dailey, a Tennessee State University faculty member and president of the International Florence Price Festival, who also participated in this recent series. This earlier concert involved an immersion project in which students transcribed manuscripts from the 2009 discovery into usable pieces to sing in a choral concert. The concert was well received and well attended, and it was even highlighted on a local news station. Not long after, the pandemic hit, and it was difficult to build on that momentum. Performance opportunities were limited, but we had a lot of time to think about what we could do next and on a larger scale after emerging from the pandemic.
In the fall of 2022, as things were starting to get back to normal, a federal grant opportunity came through the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation. This opportunity felt like a way to leverage our in-house expertise into something bigger. We were experienced in putting on her music and overcoming obstacles when that music was unavailable, as we saw in 2018. Then, it was just a matter of scale. Could we go from one concert with students to as many concerts as our budget would support?
The National Endowment for the Arts, the provider of the grant we received, values high-quality artistic production, which we have represented with Price’s repertoire but also in the talents of the performing artists. Putting together the grant proposal was like a jigsaw puzzle in that we had to match Price’s large catalog to artists locally, nationally, and internationally who could best advocate for Price and be in conversation with her music, which was fun to think through. I wanted to work with a composer and a pianist as our special guests since Price herself was a composer and pianist. The distinguished pianist I selected was one of my long-time collaborators and UK-based musician, Samantha Ege. And we brought in a terrific composer, Camila Cortina Bello, who is a Cuban-born, New York-based composer that Dr. Ege had previously commissioned. It was cool to think about these existing networks of music production.
The dream for this festival, as I said earlier, was to bring in different musicians and numerous styles of music to animate a portrait of Price as a person and as a composer. We wanted this variety so that people coming to multiple events or students later viewing the archival videos of the performances could get a deeper sense of Price and her artistry.
CC: Speaking of the archival videos, who has access to these materials? What are other ways that the performances are being preserved?
DS: Blair creates archival videos of all performances that happen at Blair. Currently, they are limited to Vanderbilt-affiliated users because of copyright restrictions. The videos will be available for teaching purposes in perpetuity, and I’ve already started using them in my classes to illustrate ideas about Florence Price and her songs. This resource is especially cool because some of the songs have never been recorded, so we have unique performances available for teaching and studying if students are interested in performing this music in their recitals. We’re still thinking about archival access for the wider public. Having received a federally funded grant, we want to make the music more largely accessible, so we’re discussing the feasibility with copyright constraints and licensing fees.
In spring 2024, the Curb Center will host an exhibit called The Glory of the Day, showing LeXander Bryant’s photographs of the performances from Florence Price: A Celebration. My colleagues at the Curb Center, Leah Lowe and Molly Barth, have deeply understood and appreciated this project from the beginning, recognizing its power to bring the community together and highlight the incredible artistry, not only of Price but of the musicians performing her music. Creating a photographic archive of these performances will create a monument to Price and her music for future research and show how alive Nashville and the communities involved have been.
Rather than run-of-the-mill documentation, the Curb Center selected a photographic artist with an artistic vision that resonated with the ideas of this project. Importance was placed on the preservation of performances, recognition of Nashville’s Black communities, and documentation of the everyday stories of people’s lives. On this last concept, Bryant tries to capture the human dimension of the musicians on stage, not losing them to a halo of greatness in the performance. When the exhibit launches, it will be an opportunity for the participants from select events to come back together and reflect on the experience of the festival in its entirety. Intersections between different performances will be evident in the exhibit, which will live in the music library’s special collections as a unique archive. Price’s activities were not adequately documented in her lifetime, so we have taken extra care in preserving this local slice of music history.
CC: You have already touched on how this project has been highly collaborative, but please speak more about the partnerships that made this festival possible and the importance of having programs throughout Nashville.
DS: Many of the institutions in Nashville—classical music-affiliated ones, at least—understand the importance of Florence Price, not only historically but in the present moment, so they’ve all been eager to jump on this project with us and share resources. Working with a variety of institutions, each brought widely different strength. For instance, Tennessee State University, critical to this project, has made the news recently for being under-resourced by the government, essentially in a deliberate way. It was important to me and other collaborators that TSU be involved because Price spent several years of her life teaching at historically Black colleges and universities and academies for younger students. HBCUs have long preserved Price’s music, so any recent talk about the discovery of Price is referring to highly resourced, mainstream, predominately white institutions learning about Price for the first time. Therefore, we were considering the institutional relationship of these organizations to Price and how can we best honor those relationships.
One thing that made this project distinctive was a faculty exchange, in which we had several Blair faculty members perform at TSU and TSU faculty at Blair. This allowed our students to see that although we all do music, each institution approaches music with different philosophies and pedagogies. This project revealed a huge willingness of faculty and the community to come together to bring new opportunities to life with about twenty Blair faculty eager to be involved. You might say that the celebration was a very “Vanderbilt” project in that our university culture of radical collaboration pushed me to do this project. I had an inner motivation, but without that culture and support, it never would have left my head. I hope this collaborative culture continues because it’s distinctive to our campus, and there are so many ways we can grow in this practice to continue trans-institutional thinking and create a real local impact through our collaborations.
CC: What is your hope for future projects relating to either research on Price or continued collaborations between Nashville organizations?
DS: A lot of research shows there is a ton of existing music that does not get explored routinely, much like Price’s music did not receive exposure for several decades. Simultaneously, we could do a better job at commissioning new music. There are many composers, classical and cross-over jazz composers, in town with whom we could do commissioning projects that perhaps ensembles from TSU and Blair could work together to premiere. There are so many opportunities for musical collaborations here because it's Music City, and I hope we can continue these relationships with our colleagues around the city. Let’s leverage our talents and continue to make Music City a reality in which everyone can be involved! Part of preserving Price’s legacy means supporting the kind of effort Price was making to create new works. My goal for this project, more than anything, was to show that classical music is not dead and that there are new things to be done all the time.
Douglas Shadle (University of Houston, B.M. and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A. and Ph.D.) is an associate professor in the Blair School of Music. His research explores the roles played by symphony orchestras and orchestral music in American culture, past and present.
Be sure to check out the exhibition The Glory of the Day: LeXander Bryant Meets Florence Price for another chance to experience Florence Price: A Celebration. This exhibition will be displayed at the Curb Center from February 9 through March 8. Nashville-based photographer and multimedia artist LeXander Bryant was commissioned to not only document the performances but to engage artistically with performers, communities, the archive of music, and Florence Price herself. Bryant’s photographs, the product of these encounters, speak to the ephemeral nature of live performance, the communion between artists across time, location, and medium, and the ever-evolving nature of the archive.