Nimble Feet
Florence B. Smith Price (1887 – 1953) was the first female African-American composer to receive national recognition. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and taught in Little Rock before becoming Head of the Music Department at Clark Atlanta University. Price played piano and organ and wrote more than three hundred compositions, including symphonies, concertos, chamber works, art songs, and settings of spirituals for voice and piano. She has the distinction of being the first African American to have her work performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
“Nimble Feet” is one of three pieces that comprise her Dances in the Canebrakes. Canebrakes were areas in Mississippi where tall, tough grass grew. Enslaved people worked to clear the land in order to plant cotton. Somehow they still had the energy to dance when the canebrakes were cleared. Composed in 1953, the offbeat rhythms recall ragtime. I found this piece in Volume 3 of William H. Chapman Nyaho’s Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora. I met Nyaho at a Music Teachers National Convention in 2006. He wore traditional African clothing, so I’m wearing the dashiki I bought at the Underground Railroad Museum.
Another Afro-American composer, William Grant Still, who grew up in Little Rock, arranged these dances for orchestra. Here they are performed by the Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. The 9-1/2 minute video begins with Nimble Feet and includes two more dances: Tropical Noon, and Silk Hat and Walking Cane. The photo of canebrakes brings all the dances together.
In January, 2020, the Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestra performed Still’s orchestrated version of Dances in the Canebrakes. Michael Fink’s program notes shed more light:
Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887 and died in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. She completed her work Dances in the Canebrakes in 1953, and it was later orchestrated by William Grant Still. The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, alto saxophone, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
Florence Price (née Smith) (1887-1953) is a significant Black composer of concert music. Among her many other honors, Price was the first African-American woman to have a composition performed by a major orchestra.
She hailed from the area of Little Rock, Arkansas, where she graduated high school (as valedictorian) at the age of 14. Moving on to Boston’s New England Conservatory, she studied piano and organ, composing her first symphony and graduating with honors (1906) with a double major in organ and music education. Professor/Composer George Whitefield Chadwick continued to be a mentor to Price for many years. Returning to Arkansas, Florence taught at the college level, and in 1912, she married Attorney Thomas J. Price. Together they had two daughters and a son.
To escape racial oppression, the Price family moved to Chicago in 1927. There Florence began a long period of compositional activity. Notably, her Symphony in E minor won a major award and was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, conducting.
In 1931, the Prices divorced, and Florence soon moved in with her close friend, Margaret Bonds. At that point, Price’s most productive creative period began. In addition to orchestral, chamber, and piano music, she composed widely for the voice, leading to warm, valuable friendships with black singers Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. (Anderson would usually end her recitals with a Black spiritual as arranged by Price.) In 1964, Chicago honored Price (posthumously) by naming an elementary school after her.
Many of Price’s compositions focused on the Black American Experience, spanning its history from the days of slavery through the first half of the 20th century. This is the case with her three piano pieces collectively titled Dances in the Canebrake. A canebrake is a thicket of tall cane plants, similar to bamboo that grows at the marshy edge of a stream or lake. Canebrakes are common in the Deep South. In pre-Civil War days, when the South’s rich economy depended almost entirely on growing and processing cotton, canebrakes (wild stands of cane) had to be cleared before the adjacent land could be cultivated for cotton planting. Teams of Black slaves labored on the clearing jobs, apparently lasting several days in many cases. Thus, at night they would probably amuse themselves by singing and dancing.
Florence Price composed Dances in the Canebrakes in its original piano version in 1953, the year of her death (from a stroke). Thus part of the work’s significance is that it was one of her last compositions. Subsequently, a more successful Black composer, William Grant Still, orchestrated the three movements of the little suite. The connection between Price and Still is unclear.
The easily heard underlying rhythms of the three “dances” were derived from stage and ballroom dances from the time of Scott Joplin (c. 1900) and earlier. The first movement, titled “Nimble Feet,” is a “rag.” We hear this intertwined with fragments of a cheery melody.
A “slow drag,” the dominant rhythm of the second movement, supports a dreamy melody, which is passed around various sections of the orchestra. The central musical segment is more assertive, before consolidating both moods in a final segment of music.
The word “cane” in the last movement’s title, “Silk Hat and Walking Cane,” may be a play on words. The predominant rhythm here is the “cakewalk,” a ballroom dance of the late 19th century. Again in three sections, the music cleverly combines the feeling of theatrical dance with fashionable ballroom dancing.
– Michael Fink
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