![]() ![]() Maxile says that could be due in part to how classical music is tied to class and race in America. ![]() When it came to black composers, the situation she found back home wasn’t much different than the strictures she faced abroad. I think they had vaguely heard of Aaron Copland, maybe, but I remember wanting to play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and it was laughable that I would do such a thing.” “I remember wanting to play something American, and … they didn't know anything about American music. “Studying in Europe was the first time that I encountered this kind of bias against a certain type of American music,” she says. Likewise, she found that works by American composers were generally ignored by European conservatories. While studying in Europe, where she walked in the footsteps of composers like Beethoven and Mozart, she says she felt the contradiction of feeling at home playing the piano eight hours a day while also being an outsider twice over-both as an American and as a person of color. Growing up in a white environment in San Francisco, she says, left her filled with questions about the part of her family she had lost-questions that led her to trace the larger arc of American identity on her 2001 album American Ballads, and then on America Again in 2016, which included her studio performance of Price’s “Fantasie Negre.” “I was living in cities like Berkeley and New York and sort of processing myself through the eyes of other people and just having all of this input about what it means to walk in the world as a person of color.”ĭownes’s childhood in California was preoccupied with loss her father fell ill and died when she was 9 years old. “I had just come back to this country by myself without my family,” who remained in Europe, she says. But for Downes, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and a Jewish mother who had lived abroad since her teenage years, her quest was as much a search for her own identity. That Downes had never encountered Price before finding the library book, despite training at conservatories in Vienna, Paris and Basel, Switzerland, sent her deeper in search of composers of color, and Americans in particular. ![]() “There could also be evocations of the dance by way of lots of syncopated rhythms and snapped rhythms that feel like stomp, clap, stomp, clap.” “There could be actual quotes of spiritual tunes, or allude to the spiritual by way of their melodic content,” Maxile says. Maxile, Jr., a music theory professor at Baylor University whose musicology work centers on African American composers, often came in the rhythms and note choices. Such overt references in classical and concert music to spirituals, notes Horace J. Lara Downes' new Rising Sun project hopes to reframe the history of American classical music by embracing its diverse origins and composers of color. ![]() Burleigh’s composition “On Bended Knees,” for example, notably quotes the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Burleigh took spirituals, a form borne out of a mix of African traditions with Christian themes, and enshrined them in the lexicon of concert performance music. Inspired by social and artistic movements in Harlem and Chicago, musicians like Price or Harry T. She plans to release one song per week to streaming platforms, with a new theme every month, beginning February 5.ĭuring an era when American popular music was defined by Aaron Copland's sweeping fanfares and George Gershwin's cinematic melding of styles, African American composers brought their own heritage to their music. The project, created and curated by Downes and assisted by veteran classical music producer Adam Abeshouse, is a series of newly recorded works written by black composers-including many works that have never been recorded before-performed by Downes with guest artists. Downes, who also hosts Amplify with Lara Downes on NPR, first came across Price’s music in the mid-aughts, in a dusty library copy of a collection of compositions by Price and her contemporaries.ĭownes’ new project, Rising Sun Music, aims to reframe the history of American classical music by embracing its diverse origins and composers of color like Price, while building a more inclusive future for the genre. “It was this sound that people hadn't heard before.” Although Price was the first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, her works remained outside the mainstream of classical concert music, not to mention beyond name recognition of the most casual classical music fan. Instead of relying on motifs typical of the time period, Price injected a new musical influence by adapting the melody of the soulful spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” Classical pianist Lara Downes knew she was onto something profound when audiences began to react to her show-closing rendition of “ Fantasie Negre,” a 1929 composition by the African American composer Florence Beatrice Price. ![]()
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