Digging in the Crates
Florence Price, Karen Slack, and a few thoughts towards redefining "rediscovered"
Back in October 2020, I was on a Zoom call with Karen Slack, discussing her appearance in a socially-distanced performance of Beethoven’s Egmont (and obsessing over her Bridget Riley-esque glasses). Being that it was October 2020, the timing was ripe for a revival of Beethoven’s work about the pursuit of justice and freedom against authoritarianism. It was a natural springboard to discuss, in the year of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, the push to broaden the canon beyond the same composers who are programmed year after year.
“Young musicians are really pissed off with these organizations and these institutions, that they've been denied the opportunity to study and to perform these unheard works,” she said at the time, “and I’m finding it very fascinating that these young musicians are like, No, I'm not gonna do the top ten.”
To that end, one thing that stuck with me from my interview with Slack had nothing to do with Beethoven, Egmont, or even despotism. It had to do with Showbiz & A.G.: “I’m never gonna stop singing Strauss, everyone knows that, but there are other composers in there that deserve a place. We need to dig in the crates and get those unheard compositions out there.”
Beyond the Years, a collection of unpublished Florence Price songs that Slack recorded with pianist Michelle Cann for Azica Records, brings that idea full circle. Its opening track, “Desire,” sounds like a statement of intent for this possible new world that Slack and I discussed in 2020:
“I want life, the whole of it,
Here in my hand,
The brimming bowl of it
To drink as I stand;
Draining the flower of it
Acid or sweet,
To know one hour of it
Life, or defeat.”
But mostly I love this song because of its overall too-much-ness. We get that from the lines of poet Orma Jean Surbey (who, according to Beyond the Years producer ONEcomposer, “considered it the poet’s duty to ‘sense things beyond commonplace, and help others stretch their consciousness’”). But Price enhances that feeling, turning it up to eleven in her score: a few Léhar-esque opening notes that quickly ignite into full-fathomed longing. It’s like Wagner minus the myth and metaphor, more direct and bracing.
I was reminded of my conversation with Slack earlier this week, when Beyond the Years won the Grammy for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. It marked the second Grammy win for the composer, following 2023’s Best Orchestral Album, Works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, Valerie Coleman. It was also the third consecutive year that a Price recording was nominated (the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of her Symphony No. 4 lost out to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recording of Adès’s Dante). “By any measure, a Florence B. Price renaissance is well underway,” wrote musicologists and Price co-biographers Samantha Ege and Douglas Shadle in 2023.
That renaissance was sparked in part by the 2009 sale of an abandoned and ransacked house in the Illinois hamlet of St. Anne. In cleaning the property out, the new owners discovered boxes of musical manuscripts belonging to the previous owner: Florence Price. The papers were soon acquired by the University of Arkansas as part of their Florence Price archives. In 2018, an Alex Ross essay in the New Yorker ran under the online headline “The Rediscovery of Florence Price.” Later that year, publisher G. Schirmer announced that it gained the exclusive publication rights for Price’s scores.
If classical music loves anything, it’s the chance to celebrate a composer who is already widely celebrated with a series of increasingly dubious anniversaries (birth years, death years, premieres, that one time they got syphilis…). But if classical music loves two things, it’s the chance to celebrate a composer who is already widely celebrated with a series of increasingly dubious anniversaries and the chance to “rediscover” a composer considered to be “lost.” In his 2018 essay for the New Yorker, Ross wrote “she is mentioned more often than she is heard,” which was somewhat fair: Of the 142 albums that Presto Classical lists for Florence Price’s music, over 100 of them were released after Ross’s piece was published.
“Only within the last year or two has Price — remembered after her death (if at all) for her arrangements of spirituals — begun to enter the canon,” Mark Swed wrote in 2022. Given the flurry of activity in the last several years, Swed wasn’t wrong. The “if at all” also reflected a general lack of knowledge about Price’s music. She certainly was never mentioned in the music history class I took in college a little over 20 years ago. There again, I had an argument with that professor about the Middle Eastern roots of notated vocal music, which they dismissed as a myth, a reflection of musicologist A. Kori Hill’s assertion that “the ‘rediscovered’ Black composer is a tired, damaging trope. It reflects an active process, where certain histories and cultural memories are not considered ‘relevant’ to the mainstream until they prove useful.”
This isn’t to discredit the 2009 discovery, which Samantha Ege calls “significant.” It’s not the discovery as an act that’s the problem, it’s the narrative of discovery. One that, in Price’s case, Ege describes as “a form of Columbusing,’—i.e., ‘the art of discovering something that is not new.’”
Beyond Hill and Ege, much has been said about the specifics of discourse (which Douglas Shadle summarized beautifully in 2020). There have also been reports on the shortcomings of this Price renaissance, namely in the many errors found in Schirmer’s newly-published editions of her works, as documented by pianist Sharon Su.
To me, this all feeds back into Katie da Cunha Lewin’s 2020 essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Politics of Rediscovery.” Looking at the “rediscovery” narrative from a broader perspective, largely on art and literature, da Cunha Lewin traces how genuine efforts to restore some balance to the canons of the past have devolved into an act of “virtuous consumption,” distilling these legacies down to marketing copy and Instagram posts that seem like the cultural version of You Did Not Eat That. “Such intrepid explorers are spared any criticism of conspicuous consumption because the individuals whose lives and careers they are celebrating have yet to be sufficiently raided for profit,” writes da Cunha Lewin.
Karen Slack and Michelle Cann’s Beyond the Years shows us what an alternative reality might be for composers like Price as more of their works are made more accessible to artists and audiences. Even though the songs that make up Beyond the Years are unpublished, the album isn’t billed as a rediscovery. It’s not billed as cratedigging either, but I think that’s exactly what it is.
“Cratedigging isn’t merely ‘record shopping,’” writes Kathy Iandoli. “It’s a hunt for the DNA of a popular song you’re in love with. An addiction to origins.” If cratedigging initially became a thing based on the number of DJs looking for samples, I still don’t see it as a purely transactional process, nor do most historians. “I've come to think a lot more practically about writing history as kind of re-mixing it and digging in the crates,” says Jeff Chang, who wrote one of the definitive histories of the genre. “I've dug in those crates. Let me go and dig in my own sort of crates.”
To me, this is what Slack and Cann did with Beyond the Years. In an alumni interview with the Curtis Institute, Cann mentioned that Price has been a mainstay in her discography (she also appeared on the Grammy-winning Works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, Valerie Coleman). That familiarity made it easier to work with these songs, many of which lacked any reference recording. It also enabled Cann to see the unexpected techniques that Price brought to many of these works, compared to what she already knew of her. “It just confirmed what I knew about her, that she was such a varied writer with so many influences,” she said. “She, as any great composer would, evolved in her writing style and grew over time, and tried different things.”
In this way, digging also becomes a conversation; between history and the present, as well as between history and the future — the future, in this case, of what concert and recital programs look like, of what the recording industry looks like, of what new compositions look like. It’s the continuity of a musical legacy, and in a way it’s also demonstrating a sense of care for both the music itself and its composer.
The intimacy of “Desire” continues throughout Beyond the Years. Many of the songs addressed to a “you.” Some songs have moments that echo the same brimming emotional tidal wave of the opening track (I get catches of Robert’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta in both “The Dawn’s Awake” and “Who Grope with Love for Hands” — samples in and of themselves). Yet many of the most confessional and revealing verses are delivered, musically, in quiet flickers of pillow-talk — lowered volumes and points where Slack’s lush soprano and Cann’s equally-verdant piano lines overlap tonally. “What Do I Care for Morning” could, in another world, have been a Marlene Dietrich torch number. Perhaps that intimacy is one of the reasons I don’t ever get the sense of “discovery,” top-down or otherwise, from the album. Rather, I feel like I’m being let in on a conversation that has been going on, uninterrupted, for over a century — one that will keep going on whether I stick around or not.