André Hodeir concluded his book Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music—in some ways the triumphal song of the postwar musical avant-garde—not with a swaggering victory lap, but with worry for how one nation’s parochialism threatened the progress of music. “In America, the freedom of expression is so great that one would have expected it to produce a vast creative movement,” he wrote. Instead, he found that not only was hostility to modernism endemic, but its leading composers and musical elite cheerfully accepted the stylistic fetters forced upon their peers in the Soviet Union. His remarks came to mind earlier this month when I read about this year’s classical Grammy winners. What passes for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” is hardly surprising anymore given how hatred against the perceived anti-populism of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors has practically become a catechism learned by rote for America's young composers. (Whose music, despite their pretenses, is only ever intelligible to other fellow tonsured academics.) However, the winner for “Best Orchestral Performance”—the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of African-American composer Florence Price’s First and Third Symphonies—is representative of the emerging intersectional alliance between musical reactionaries on one hand and race-obsessed opportunists on the other.
Commentators have speculated tantalizingly why Price’s music had been mostly ignored until the 21st century. In spite of graduating with honors (in organ and teaching) from the New England Conservatory of Music, Price’s composing career only began in earnest when she was on the cusp of her 40s. Arguably, her greatest professional success occurred in 1933 when her First Symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a special concert in that year’s World’s Fair. The conductor was Frederick Stock, its longtime music director. He never conducted the music again. Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, later ignored Price’s appeal to interest him in her work.
It is tempting to read Stock’s apparent abandonment and Koussevitzky’s failure to even acknowledge Price as another example of Jim Crow-era racism. She herself probably believed that to be the case. “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race,” she explained to the latter conductor. Yet both men were (along with Leopold Stokowski) the most enthusiastic champions of living orchestral music in the prewar era. Between them, they conducted the world and American premieres of scores by composers that represented a cross-section of 20th century music ranging from the modernist to the traditional: from Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky to Alexander Glazunov and Howard Hanson, among many others. Comparison to any of them establishes that Price’s music is not merely “conservative,” as Richard Evidon generously declared in the Grammy-award winning CD’s liner notes, but simply amateurish. Symphonic architecture, particularly thematic development, is practically non-existent; her orchestration is merely functional, her sense of harmony prosaic. One only has to ask themselves: would anybody even notice this music, let alone play it had it been composed not by an African-American woman, but by somebody like the white, heterosexual male Carl Ruggles, a notorious bigot even by the standards of his time who also happened to compose some of the most transcendentally radical and humane music this country has yet produced? The obviousness of that answer has not stopped some from calling her “inspirational” or even a “forgotten genius.”
Alex Ross cannily evades this problem by suggesting that the notion of musical greatness is implicitly racist. “The adulation of the master, the genius, the divinely gifted creator all too easily lapses into a cult of the white-male hero, to whom such traits are almost unthinkingly attached,” a feat of intellectual dishonesty that simultaneously ignores the dazzling greatness of countless other non-white composers, as well as inadvertently reinforcing the systemic racism he decries. What “special pleading,” as Ross defensively writes about Price, do composers like Hashimoto Kunihiko, Earl Kim, Mesías Maiguashca, Moroi Saburō, Silvestre Revueltas, Amadeo Roldán, George Walker, or the remarkable auto-didact Luis Humberto Salgado need when the potency of their talent and skill is evident to anybody with ears to hear? Their continued exclusion from recognition within the Western classical music canon by the socially and aesthetically narrow-minded reveals the hierarchy of grievances at the heart of today’s conversations about race, wherein both whites and African-Americans only ever see each other, to their mutual political advantage, while Asians and Latinos are locked out. Moreover, the paternalistic acclamation of the regressive Price comes at the cost of persistently ignored American composers like Wallingford Riegger and Roger Sessions, whose posthumous quasi-official oblivion is now doubled as a result of their unfashionable musical complexity and race/sex.
As critic Victor Carr Jr. wrote years ago, “Price’s music [...] still holds an important place in the history of African-American concert music, and American music in general, and if it’s not all great, it also doesn’t deserve its current neglect.” The patronizing discourse of Price’s boosters is insulting to her and other non-white composers, not to mention a threat to the very canon of greatness that Price evidently cherished and imperfectly aspired to belong.