Today is Public Radio Music Day. It’s a small celebration of the more than 700 public radio stations playing music as part of their schedule, stations that share more than 20 million listeners weekly. And we certainly celebrate music here at Ozarks at Large. And the University of Arkansas will celebrate one of the state’s legendary musical figures, Florence Price, next month.
Price, born in Little Rock in 1887, composed her first piece at age 11, earned degrees in organ performance and piano pedagogy, composed more than 300 works during her lifetime and is recognized as the first African American woman to have a work performed by a major U.S. symphony.
The Florence Price International Piano Competition at the UofA will feature young artist performances, talks devoted to the career of Price, a special exhibit of material relating to Florence Price shared by Special Collections at the university, and there will be an opening night concert from Michelle Cann, piano chair at the Curtis Institute of Music, and Michael Clark from Baylor University.
We wanted to get a preview of this festival in early November, so last week we invited two of the principals involved to our studio. Xiting Yang is the founder and artistic director of the festival. She’s also teaching assistant professor of piano at the University of Arkansas, and Joshua Youngblood is associate dean for Special Collections. Xiting says Price’s catalog is a diverse collection of work.
Yang: Yeah, I was just listening to her music this morning on the drive here. I listened to her symphony. I listened to her piano fantasy and also listened to this famous piece inspired by African American spiritual, “The Adoration,” which we have the manuscript. Right. It was just so interesting how multifaceted her influences are.
She was very classically trained and she graduated valedictorian from her school. So she is very smart and very hard working and also combined with a lot of talent that’s rare to come by. And so I was just admiring how easy it is to catch on her melody. And once you listen deeply, you hear the very well-trained compositional skills in her music, too.
Kellams: You’re going to have the exhibition together in Special Collections. That’s because Special Collections has a connection with Florence Price.
Youngblood: Strong connection. And we’re very proud that the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Libraries are the home to the vast majority of the manuscripts and archive for Florence Price, who is now such a significant composer and is widely recognized for her performance as well when she was alive.
And so we have not just one or two pieces. We have a lot of material. We have six different archives that relate to Florence Price. We’re always collecting Price and we get to showcase her.
And so this is a great opportunity for Special Collections to make sure that everyone knows that these materials are available to them. So students, visiting performers, researchers, they can all see the material that’s on exhibit, or maybe even stop by and do a little research while they’re in town.
We love to host people that work with Florence Price, so our exhibiting will showcase pieces that are going to be performed that people will hear, which is great. We’ll actually share the original manuscripts as best we can of those things.
But we also like to show Florence Price’s biographical materials, her deep connection to the state of Arkansas. When she was a working professional in publishing, she was in Chicago, but she comes from a prominent middle-class family in Little Rock, and we have her family materials as well. So we’ll show these beautiful pictures of her as a young person, some of her early work, some of her diaries, but also showcase her family and a little bit of that Arkansas connection, too.
Kellams: As a musician, when you hear someone’s composition, you can learn something. Can you learn something from looking at her papers and looking at her sheet music?
Yang: Yes, I can. I can see that she was a very neat person. And she probably had, I don’t know this, maybe Joshua will know more. She probably had a lot of drafts, but when she actually wrote it down, it seemed very neatly written. Is that true?
Youngblood: That’s absolutely true. And within her manuscript holdings, sometimes we’ll have three, four, five different versions of some of the pieces. So you can see her ideas were working. You can also see how she was refining the script itself.
One of the wonderful things I get to do with students is when they see how neat her actual composition by hand was, they’re kind of blown away because they don’t think that they can do it that neat, too. Of course, we also have a typewriter from Florence Price. She used a typewriter in her practice as well.
But the breadth of her materials have notes in her diary with little musical notations. And you can see how it makes its way to an initial draft. And then it makes it into a performance score eventually. So it’s really fascinating to see that whole process. And we get researchers all the time who want to look at every single different iteration. We have to compare them.
And about the variety of her influences, within her archives, you can see she was working with Langston Hughes and other librettists. Then she was also talking to members of her African American community in Chicago to draw on folklore traditions and spirituals. And so it’s the entire range of American culture shows up in her pieces, and then she carefully works into the finished product. It’s really amazing to see that.
Kellams: The value of having a two-day event like this to celebrate an Arkansan, someone who has so much in Special Collections, who means so much to music, what’s the value both for campus and community to have this event?
Yang: So a piano competition is a platform and opportunity for young students, younger artists, a way for them to showcase the projects that they’ve been working on, their concert programs.
And Florence Price being Arkansan treasure, we are the center of her research here. It just seems a super natural thing to combine performances, scholarship and events that’s open to public, lectures to celebrate her and to honor her. And I think such a worthwhile thing to do to preserve her legacy.
Youngblood: Yes. Special Collections stewards her legacy very carefully and very intentionally. We’re very proud to do that. And so any opportunity we have. But this is a particularly great opportunity because also showcases the partnership between the University Libraries and the Department of Music with professors like Dr. Yang, who we get to work with.
It’s a great opportunity to show how we’re not just promoting the legacy and making sure that she’s preserved, but showing how the work endures and continues to inspire people and is accessible to people.
And so bringing people on to campus to learn about the cutting-edge scholarship that’s still being done on Florence Price, to hear the amazing music, to hear the performances, to see the students who are learning from her still. That’s a really great opportunity for us and the community we serve.
Kellams: How will the competition work?
Yang: How does it generally work?
Kellams: Yeah, those of us who have not been in that world.
Yang: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. So a piano competition, it’s kind of a process. So there will be students submitting their videos of them playing to the competition panel, the judging panel, so they can be advanced to the next round.
So these two-day events will be a final round of their performance and they will play pieces that they’ve been working on and the judges will pick who are the most well-deserving.
And what’s interesting about this competition that’s different from other piano competitions, they will have to talk about their music. And I don’t think I know any other piano competition that does this. So we are very proud that we are probably one of the only piano competitions that require that.
I think that the students either get very nervous about talking about music or they love it. I personally have grown to love it because I feel like it’s such a sort of way to relax one’s mind before performing. And you know so much about their personality, who they are, their identity, their voice, what they’re trying to do with that program, with the music.
I mean, music is to express what cannot be said by words. But sometimes you need some words to help us understand a little more.
Kellams: You’ve agreed to play Florence Price piece.
Yang: Yes. I’ll play Florence Price piece.
Kellams: Well, what will we hear?
Yang: So I’m gonna play a small piece called “Song Without Words.” So this is a perfect example of how she has drawn influence from European classical composers. So this is a tradition established by Fanny Mendelssohn and Felix Mendelssohn.
So a song without words is a little character piece where people can think about what the music is actually talking about. It should be a song, but it’s done without words. And she actually suggested a little subtitle called “Pleading.” So I would love if you can see if you can hear any pleading and if you can hear any yearning from just mere notes on the page.
Music
Xiting Yang performing Florence Price at the Mary Baker Rumsey Steinway piano in the Firmin-Garner Performance Studio at KUAF. She is the founder and artistic director of the upcoming Florence Price International Piano Festival at the University of Arkansas, taking place Nov. 6 and 7. She is also teaching assistant professor of piano at the UofA.
We also heard Joshua Youngblood, associate dean for Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. You can find all the details about the festival, including the opening night concert featuring Michelle Cann and Michael Clark, and the special exhibition of Price materials at florenceprice.uark.edu.
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