INTERVIEW: Catalyst continues ‘Uncovered’ series with Florence B. Price album
Image courtesy of Catalyst String Quartet / Provided by Crossover Media with permission.
The Catalyst String Quartet is working on a multi-year project that brings awareness to Black composers, some of whom have been under-recorded in the annals of classical music, according to press notes. The expansive project is called Uncovered, and Vol. 2 focuses on Florence B. Price. The recording features the quartet alongside the piano work of Michelle Cann.
For those who don’t know the Grammy-winning Catalyst String Quartet, the group consists of Karla Donehew Perez on violin, Abi Fayette on violin, Paul Laraia on viola and Karlos Rodriguez on cello. They have brought to life Price’s work in unique and interesting ways. On the recording, listeners can enjoy four string quartets (three of which are world premieres) and two piano quintets (one of which is a world premiere), according to a press release. The album comes on the heels of Vol. 1, which focused on the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Spoiler alert to Catalyst fans: Three composers have been selected for the forthcoming Vol. 3.
“We started planning the project in 2018, but it was really something that had been brewing for many years before that,” Donehew Perez said in a recent phone interview. “We teach a summer program that’s through the Sphinx organization called the Sphinx Performance Academy, and the program is for 12 to 17-year-old Latinx string players. It’s a chamber music intensive, and our faculty members, we not only try to perform concerts for them of standard repertoire — Beethoven, Brahms, Hayden, Mozart string quartets — but we also feel it’s important to bring in works by musicians of color. And so over many years of hearing our colleagues playing these works, and thinking to ourselves well, that’s a great piece, and that’s a great piece, and why isn’t that one performed, and why don’t people play these, they’re so great, we kind of decided we needed to record these works.”
The quartet faced several challenges during the recording process. For starters, there are virtually no quality recordings of some of these compositions. This was alarming to the Catalyst musicians, and they felt a desire to correct that historical wrong. However, they also needed to rely solely on the composer’s notes rather than other musicians’ interpretations.
“What we wanted to do was to take all of these works and put them in one place,” she said. “So under the umbrella of the Undercover project, you may go in thinking I want to learn about Florence Price and her music, but then you’ll say, ‘Hey, look at Vol. 1. Look at Vol. 3-4,’ and learn about all these other really incredible works as well.”
Of the composers that the Catalyst players have selected for the Undercover project, Price’s music is the most under-recorded. The fact that there are four world premieres on this album is evidence enough of how Price’s music has not been circulated or recorded to a wide extent.
“Price faced extreme obstacles in her lifetime; however, her compositional output is vast despite the many barriers placed in her path,” the Catalyst musicians released in a press statement. “Her experience as a Black woman displaced because of the deep racism of the Jim Crow south; a wife and mother fleeing from an abusive husband; a prodigious organ student at the New England Conservatory; and as an important contributor to the great Chicago Renaissance between 1935 and 1950, where she associated with icons such as Langston Hughes, Marion Anderson, and Margaret Bonds; shaping her body of work while contributing authentically to American music in its depth and beauty. The works on this album are a powerful reminder that America’s romantic classical vernacular, as prophesied by Dvorak, owes an incredible amount to the voices history has overlooked and suppressed.”
The Catalyst String Quartet, with permission, was able to use Price’s manuscripts from the University of Arkansas. “Her music is not all fully printed yet, and a lot of it is printed badly with a lot of mistakes,” the violinist said. “So that’s another side to the project that people don’t realize is that we’ve had to do a lot of this work to figure out what the actual music is supposed to be.”
Donehew Perez added: “Obviously she had a lot of traditional influences, but her source material are spirituals and popular songs. And she also has a very unique writing style, a very unique emotional content. … We are finding inspiration in vocal tradition because there’s a much longer recorded vocal tradition of spirituals and plantation songs than there is in instrumental music, and so we were really inspired by that first and getting an idea of what was Florence Price’s life like at that time. What was she listening to? Who was she around?”
Now modern-day audiences who may have never heard of Price can enjoy her compositional works anew.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Uncovered Vol. 2: Florence B. Price is now available from the Catalyst String Quartet on Azica Records. Click here for more information.
