Drink to me With Thine Own Eyes from Five Folksongs in Counterpoint
Florence Price
About the Composer
Pioneering American composer, pianist, organist, and educator, Florence Price spent her entire career breaking barriers that were in place to limit her not only based on her race, but her gender as well. She was not only the first Black American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, but the first to have one of her compositions played by a major orchestra.
Price was born Florence Beatrice Smith on April 9, 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father was Black, the only African American dentist in the city, and her mother was White, a music teacher who guided Price’s early musical education. Immediately, Price displayed an incredible aptitude at the piano and gave her first public performance at the age of 4. By 11 she had her first composition published and three years later, at the age of 14, she graduated valedictorian of her high school. After graduation she moved to Boston, Massachusetts to study at New England Conservatory. She graduated in 1906 with honors, an Artist’s Diploma in organ, and a teaching certificate. After graduating, Price held teaching positions at multiple schools in the South, including one as the head of the music department at Clark College in Atlanta from 1910-1912. Two years later she married lawyer Thomas J. Price and moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas. However, presumably due to the staggering and inescapable racism in the South, the family relocated to Chicago in 1927.
The move to Chicago marked a prolific period in Price’s composition career and she continued her musical studies at the American Conservatory and the Chicago Musical College. In the 1920s Price began winning awards for her compositions and in 1932 she finally received the national recognition she very much deserved when her Symphony in E minor won the Wanamaker Foundation Award. The work was premiered in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and became the first composition by a Black American woman to be played by a major orchestra. After this groundbreaking success she continued to prolifically compose and have her works performed by some of the most successful ensembles and soloists at the time, in particular American contralto Marian Anderson and American soprano Leontyne Price.
About the Music
Price’s musical style blends the influence of her Southern roots and African American heritage with her exceptional classical musical training, which was steeped in the European tradition. In her music she weaves together elements of spirituals, the blues, and twentieth-century modernism to create a world entirely her own and one that truly reflects the landscape of the United States in the mid-twentieth century.
Sadly, following Price’s death in 1953 much of her music was forgotten, which was both the result of the fact that her style was eclipsed by the ever-changing landscape of classical music in the mid-twentieth century and the fact that the majority of her some 300 compositions remained unpublished until November 2018 when the major music publisher Schirmer acquired the rights to her complete catalog and finally gave her music a chance to be regularly posthumously heard and actively performed. As a direct result there has been a resurgence of her music in the last few years, especially as more musical institutions have begun to pay attention to music written by women of color.
Price wrote her Five Folksongs in Counterpoint for string quartet. While the exact date of composition is not known, it is generally accepted to be around 1950; although American musicologist Rae Linda Brown argues it might have been written as early as 1927. In its entirely the work aptly contains five folksongs, “Calvary,” “My Darling Clementine,” “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” “Shortnin’ Bread,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” This program features the quartet’s third folksong for string orchestra. Its melody originates from a popular eighteenth-century song, which featured lyrics from Ben Jonson’s “To Cecilia,” first published in 1616. Throughout the work, Price explores traditional African American and American folk songs through the lens of contrapuntal compositional techniques. “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” opens with a chorale-like setting of the folksong’s primary melody and eventually blossoms into a series of variations that showcase Price’s immense talent for taking inherently simple melodies and transforming them through contrapuntal and harmonic manipulation.
Note by Christina Dioguardi