FIRST: Clouds <\/em>is a five-minute masterpiece. Not long after Lara\u2019s recording came out, a social-media acquaintance shared that after hearing it on the radio her mother exclaimed \u201cWhy in the world is this piece not in every<\/em> pianist\u2019s repertoire?!\u201d Indeed, of all the forty-three Price editions I released with Schirmer last year, Clouds <\/em>is probably the one that surprises and fascinates me most. That\u2019s partly because I find its continued obscurity baffling, but mostly because of its musical content \u2013 for aside from a few gapped scales, Clouds <\/em>includes no overt references to Price\u2019s Black heritage. Instead, its moody, gorgeously evocative, and unceasingly imaginative music includes everything from wispy impressionism through a Romantic idiom redolent of Robert or Clara Schumann, to a tempestuous section that some performers say reminds them of Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, along with other material that I personally can\u2019t imagine coming from anyone but Price herself. These disparate stylistic impulses are brought together in a seemingly spontaneous, but also deeply methodical, rondo-like form.<\/p>\n And then it hit me. In literature, in the visual arts, and in music, clouds <\/em>are the ultimate symbol of something that was profoundly lacking in Price\u2019s own life and her own world, and in our own: FREEDOM. They represent complete freedom of movement, of mood, of shape and form and color and everything else.<\/p>\n Freedom<\/em>. As a woman, Price was expected to write \u201csmall forms\u201d and slight, intimate pieces, and \u2013 as her dealings with (male) publishers and conductors <\/u><\/a>vividly attest \u2013 when she did not conform to that expectation she was either rejected or ignored. And as a Black, she was expected to compose dances and spirituals, perhaps jazz and blues (although these were regarded as dangerous in White society). In these realms, writing on terms that were dictated by the same racist White society that worked relentlessly to oppress and dehumanize Blacks, she could gain a measure of acceptance and recognition from White society. But \u2013 again, as her dealings with publishers and conductors show \u2013 when she expressed her creative imagination in other terms, including idioms that were historically the province of White men, she was ignored or rejected.<\/p>\n And the same is true of movement: Clouds <\/em>was written by a composer who had to enter buildings through specified doors, who had to view movies from the balcony, who had to live in certain neighborhoods \u2013 and this was true not only of her native Arkansas, with its Black Codes and Jim Crow society, but also of her adopted hometown of Chicago.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Worse, White society\u2019s segregation of the musical imagination of Florence Price also restricted her ability to express herself authentically to other Blacks \u2013 for neither the small but determined community of Black musicians who kept her name and her memory alive during the decades of White music historiography\u2019s virtual erasure of her presence from musical life nor the current community of Price scholars and aficionados ever knew Clouds<\/em>, ever heard it, studied, performed it. As noted above, it\u2019s completely absent from every discussion of Price\u2019s life and works published to date: the Price renaissance itself is complicit in perpetuating Price\u2019s erasure.<\/p>\n But in Clouds<\/em>, Price made good on the titular symbolism. In Clouds<\/em>, she expressed her musical imagination with a freedom that denied every fetter that her racist and sexist world would impose on her imagination. In Clouds<\/em>, she did not compose about <\/em>freedom. Rather, she composed freedom<\/em>. I know of no other musical composition that I can describe that way. It\u2019s remarkable.<\/p>\n SECOND: Now that it\u2019s available, performers are picking up Clouds <\/em>and loving it, and so are listeners: Price\u2019s musical freedom is beginning to escape the shackles of neglect that attended its encasement in the archives for nearly eighty years after Price wrote it. Lara\u2019s recording and its YouTube counterpart<\/a> have gathered tens of thousands of hits, and a YouTube video of a livestream performance<\/a> she gave for The Boulanger Initiative<\/a> last summer is immensely popular. And now, even in the cataclysm of COVID-19 shutdowns, musicians are taking it up \u2013 finding solace and joy, apparently, in Price\u2019s musical envoicing of freedom. Just a few that I\u2019ve happened upon in the last few months:<\/p>\n \u00b7 September 1, 2020<\/a>: Dr. Phoenix Park-Kim<\/a> (Professor of Music, Indiana Wesleyan University): https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch? Blacks\u2019 freedom, it would seem, still consists in the freedom to clean up Whites\u2019 mess, and to be rejected or ignored when they demand the equal protection under the laws that the Fourteenth Amendment<\/a> guaranteed them. It is up to today’s world to bring justice and freedom to those who, today as in Price’s own time, cleaned up after White society’s intransigent abuses of its own freedom.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/unnamed.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n