KELLAMS: This is Ozarks at Large, I'm Kyle Kellams.
The world continues to further discover Florence Price. New recordings of music by the Little Rock born composer continue to be released. Her music has been included on releases from the Fort Smith Symphony, the Vienna Radio Symphony, under direction of Fort Smith Symphony conductor, John Jeter, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and others.
Soprano Melissa Givens has been singing, studying and admiring Price's music for years. She'll discuss and perform Price at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville as the next guest in the Tippy McMichael Lecture Series.
Saturday, September 20 at 7 p.m., she'll deliver the presentation “Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets: a New Discovery in Florence Price.” Sunday morning, September 21, at 10, she'll offer “Rediscovering the Spirituals of Florence Price.”
Melissa Givens is an assistant professor of voice and head of voice studies at Pomona College. She says she began singing songs written by Price early in her career and kept going.
GIVENS: As it became more of a pedagogical and performer imperative to teach and perform more literature by African American performers and women composers. Excuse me, African American composers and women composers, it became more of an imperative to seek out more of her works. For me particularly, it became important to find more of her pieces.
Some of the presenting organizations that I worked with started to request more of Florence Price's works. The Ebony Opera Guild in Houston was doing more work in that space, and we had done a couple of concerts of women, African-American composers. We were doing more Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, Betty Jean King.
Then, during the pandemic we were doing more. The first major women composers’ program I did was a virtual recital back in 2020. That was Price, Bonds, Zenobia, Powell, Perry and, I can't remember who else was on it, but that's when I went deep into the Heard Edition of her 44 Art Songs and Spirituals and started pulling things out.
Then, of course, The Artist at Fifty recording. I wanted to include composers who fit my constituencies: American, African-American, classical, fit a bunch of different languages that I sang in, etc. So, of course, Price had to be included on that.
“My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” Song
I've been doing a lot of singing and teaching of her music. My original research area, ongoing, has been in the area of art songs. I think they're such an underrated, under-appreciated genre.
Everybody's kind of into the whole opera thing and the whole symphonic piano. Everybody's like, you know, let's talk about the big forms and let's talk about the smaller non-vocal forms. Song is just such a complete genre of its own, its little dramas. There's that TV show, Little Fires All Over the Place. But what about little dramas all over the place? You can have a whole beginning to end right there in three minutes.
KELLAMS: As you get deeper into a composer, do you feel like you get to know them more? Do you get to feel like you have a maybe even a better idea of how you want to sing their material?
GIVENS: Yes and no. I mean, it's kind of like, do you ever really get to know Brahms? There’s always more to discover. I think with song, too, you have that added layer of, what is it that the poet is saying? You get a new layer every time you find a new song, because there's the song part and then there's the lyric part. You have those two layers working together.
So, what was inspiring Florence to pick that particular poem? What did she see in that poem that inspired her to use her compositional gifts to make that poem come alive? You have the added gift of her inspiration to make that poem into a song.
Now, you have the original poem that lived on its own for all that time. Now, becomes this new piece of art that is something wholly separate from the thing that inspired it in the first place. Which then becomes this thing that I, as the artist, have to make yet another thing come alive. It’s a challenge. And it's a gift.
It's a gift to me as an artist to say, “here I have this awesome responsibility.” I've been given this thing that I now have to present to you and hopefully make you appreciate or find something that you can now take away and hopefully be inspired by.
KELLAMS: You mentioned Brahms. Me, as a layperson, who can't even read music or anything, Brahms just seems beautiful music. I can't relate to him at all because he lived before cars. He lived in a different country. And although Florence Price died years before I was born and decades before I knew who she was, I do think I can relate to her a little more than I can Brahms or Beethoven or Mozart. I don't know. Do you? Does that make sense?
GIVENS: It does, in a way. As I tell my kids, I call them kids, even though they think they're grown. They say that too. It's like, well, why do I want to sing this stuff? That was two hundred years old. You say, “okay, here's the deal. A, the stuff they were writing was Charli XCX for their day. Okay? Let’s clear that up right now. That was their Charli XCX.”
And B, Let's look at Mendelssohn or let's look at Brahms. They may be crusty old people now, but they were thirty and forty and twenty when they were writing this stuff. So, they were not only Charli XCX of their time, they were that age and they were feeling the same things you're feeling. They were going through the same things that they we’re going through.
We see the pictures of them as crusty old people, but they were experiencing the same things that you're feeling, the same things that I'm feeling. Those feelings that they had as young people, or as medium old people, or as young old people that made them want to write, “Auf dem Kirchhofe,” or whatever they wrote, inspires those feelings that make you want to go.
Make the kids look at the German. I say, “Okay, you don't speak German. I only kind of speak German. So, let's not only look at this English translation, let's put this English translation into, say, I don't know, Snapchat language.” How would you treat this if you were texting your bud? Let's not talk about those rosy lips from yonder fair maiden, blah, blah. You don't talk like that. So why don't we say, “yo, my lady over there with the fine face and the filter of yonder, whatever.”
KELLAMS: I love that.
GIVENS: This has to be language you can identify with. Or, you're just going to stand up there and look stupid. I can't have you doing that because that won't mean anything to anybody. I need you to get into this text in some way.
You may never have been in the love of your life, but you have certainly looked at an ice cream sundae and gone, man, I got to have that, you know. So, there is some feeling you have had that you can relate to. It may not be love, but it could be ice cream.
KELLAMS: I love this because those of us who don't study music, who don't perform music, we don't really think like this, right? We think you have a beautiful voice and the training that you've done as a musician or a vocalist, but you got to feel it too. You got to understand it.
GIVENS: Right. People say the art is dying. The art is not dying. It's the feelings that the art inspires that you can, that you can get into. So, I'm all for subtitles. I'm all for supertitles. I'm all for people coming to the show in whatever you have on.
I think we have, you know, accreted far too much stuff around our art that doesn't actually have anything to do with the art. Yes, we need to raise funds. That's great. But we need to find ways to do it. That makes it more inclusive and includes more people who can get into it in ways that reaches them where they are. Put it in a bar, put it in a library, put it somewhere where people can get to it and have it explained to them. Because there are only eight stories in the world. We keep retelling them in all these different ways that make them make sense to people.
KELLAMS: When you when you think about the appearance you're going to have in Fayetteville at Saint Paul's for the McMichael lecture, a lot of us that will be in the audience are not musicians. We are laypeople. We can appreciate music.
Do you think about the approach? I mean, you want to be approachable but also tell us more about her life and show what she did with her music. I guess my question is, do you think about it being an audience that's of general people?
GIVENS: Yes. I unfortunately never learned how to be a scholarly scholar. That's kind of my Kryptonite. I think if you want to give lectures to people that are that tend toward the boring, you're going to not be a successful lecturer. So, apologies to anyone who really likes to give boring lectures, but who wants to do that? I like to give lectures that inform people of the information but also allow them to enjoy the information.
Florence Price was an amazing woman who wrote amazing, joyful music that included everything that was part of her milieu. She lived in Chicago, which was the birthplace of jazz. She was an amazing black woman, everything that was part of her was part of the black experience: spirituals, jazz, jazz, classical, all of those were part of her life, was part of her music. Was part of the music she wrote. Was part of the music she lived. Was part of the music she breathed.
So you're going to hear all of that in the music that she wrote. Part of what's beautiful about these seven, songs by African American authors is she includes Paul Dunbar as one of those authors. She's written so much music to Paul Dunbar's poems.
If you know anything about Paul Dunbar, he wrote both, poetry in standard American English and he's also famous for his dialect poetry. Which some people don't like, because Paul Dunbar wrote dialect poetry that used African American dialect. Some people have issues with that because they think it cheapens the black experience. Just like some people don't want to sing spirituals that use, you know, “these” days and “those”.
It was a thing. There are still some people who speak in dialect. Dialect is a thing, just like there are people who speak in Brooklynese. That doesn't mean they're unintelligent. It means they're from Brooklyn. Dialect is dialect. It is not an indication of intelligence.
She set these poems, these poems in dialect. There's four of them. They're really great. One of them's called “Goodbye Jinx,” and it's a lovely little poem. And the songs are in a certain order. Well, these particular songs, it's actually one of the few cycles she wrote, the four Negro songs. Those are great.
Then, there's three other songs in that cycle that are just beautiful. One talks about the complicated relationship, it's called “Brown Arms to Mother,” and it's about a longing for a relationship with a mom. She apparently had a very complicated relationship with her mother, who was very fair skinned and at some point left the family and chose to pass for white.
There's a beautiful lullaby that's kind of half lullaby and half about a lullaby. Then there's one that's just kind of like a song to art. It's called “My Soul and I,” and it's a lovely, lovely song. I don't want to give too much away, but those are those seven songs. We may add an eighth one because it's just so gorgeous and recently out from Michael Cooper. We may include that one. I haven't decided yet. It may get long.
Then Sunday is about her spiritual. She wrote set several spirituals and most of the ones, a lot of the ones, people know. There's “My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord” that Marion Anderson premiered, and some of them lesser known. People know “Go Down Moses.” People know “Building for Kingdom, but there's one called “Some of These Days” which some people might know as “Welcome Table.”
KELLAMS: I have one last, possibly silly question.
GIVENS: We like silly questions.
KELLAMS: Okay, good, good, good. Can it be exciting when you discover either a new artist, a new composer, or a batch of new music that you didn't know before? Can you genuinely get physically excited about that?
GIVENS: Oh my gosh, you should see my library. Yes. You know, if Michael calls me and says, would you like a little preview? Of course, I get really excited. My kids are like, are you going to assign stuff you don't know, again? I'm like, of course, do you not know who I am?
I love finding new music. I know people who just want to sign the same stuff all the time or just sing the same stuff all the time. I love finding stuff I didn't know. It makes me very, very happy. There's music out there that people don't know and who's going to find it if we don't find it?
KELLAMS: Melissa Given. This has made me very happy to talk with you. Thank you so much.
GIVENS: You're so welcome. So welcome. It was my pleasure.
KELLAMS: Melissa Gibbons is an assistant professor of voice and head of Voice Studies at Pomona College. She'll deliver a pair of presentations about Florence Price at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville as part of their Tippy McMichael Lecture Series, Saturday night, September 20 at seven, and then Sunday morning, September 21 at ten. More details here. You can hear her sing “My soul's Been Anchored in the Lord” on her CD The Artist at fifty. This is Ozarks at Large.
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