‘Their music lit a fire in me’: hearing the voices of three neglected composers gave me my own

The vibrant and bold music of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Czech Vítězslava Kaprálová gave pianist Samantha Ege a sense of place and purpose

I first met Florence Price (1887-1953) and Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) in the autumn of 2009. I was an undergraduate exchange student at McGill University in Montreal, and as I sat in my professor’s early 20th-century music course and learned of the lives and music ofthese two Black female composers, it became clear these meetings were meant to happen.

Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her parents nurtured her musical gifts from a young age and she studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston. After a short return to the south, during which time Price witnessed increased racial violence towards African Americans, she moved to Chicago in the late 1920s. On 15 June 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony No 1 in E minor, making her the first Black woman composer to gain national recognition. At that same concert, the 20-year-old Chicago-born pianist Margaret Bonds became the first Black solo instrumentalist to perform with that orchestra when she played John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/32hYNhq