Music for February 23, 2020 + The Last Sunday after the Epiphany

Vocal Music

• This Glimpse of Glory – David Ashley White (b. 1944)
• The Gift to be Simple – Dale Wood (1934-2009)

Instrumental Music

• Adoration – Florence B. Price (1887–1953)
• Hyfrydol – Healey Willan (1880-1968)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew.)

• Hymn 427 - When morning gilds the skies (LAUDES DOMINI)
• Hymn 135 - Songs of thankfulness and praise (SALZBURG)
• Hymn 7 - Christ, whose glory fills the skies (RATISBON)
• Hymn 383 - Fairest Lord Jesus (ST. ELIZABETH)
• Hymn 328 - Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord (SONG 46)
• Hymn 599 -  Lift Every Voice and Sing (LIFT EVERY VOICE)
• Psalm 99 - Hal H. Hopson

The last Sunday of Epiphany is also the last Sunday of Black History Month, and we end both with two pieces which represent a crucial point in music history.

Florence Beatrice Smith Price

The opening voluntary is an organ piece by Florence Beatrice Price, the first African-American woman to have had her work performed by a major symphony orchestra. In 1933 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor. This was a time when very few women composers were given time on the concert programs. The fact that this young black woman from Arkansas had any training was pretty unique in itself.

Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was taught music by her mother from a young age after she was denied music education from the city. She then attended Boston's New England Conservatory in 1903 to study piano, organ, and composition, and returned to Arkansas with a teaching certificate to bring music education back to her hometown. However, after a series of violent, racially-charged events occurred in Little Rock, Price relocated to Chicago in 1927, where her music career greatly accelerated. She went on to have a prolific career, writing dozens of orchestral, vocal, instrumental, and chamber works, with a musical style influenced by composers such as Dvořák and Coleridge-Taylor as well as Negro spirituals and vernacular dances.

Price graduated as high school valedictorian at age 14. Her daughter once explained that Price really wanted to be a doctor, but no medical school would accept her application. So she became a composer instead! She had also been denied entry to higher musical learning in the south, so she left Little Rock in 1904 to attend the New England Conservatory and, after following her mother’s advice to present herself as being of Mexican descent, earned a bachelor of music degree in 1906, the only one of 2,000 students to pursue a double major (organ and piano performance).

Price continued to read medical journals and attended classes at local colleges and universities. She was a true lifelong learner. Music was her passion and became the field that offered her fulfillment, despite the struggles she encountered.

This simple organ work is from one of the several organ magazines of the 30s and 40s, and is more indicative of what was the norm for church music, rather than an example of Price's more sophisticated orchestral style.

James Weldon Johnson

Our Bishop, Andy Doyle, shared a post last week about the 120th anniversary of the great song of the African-Americans, Lift Every Voice and Sing. Written in 1900 as a poem honoring the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, it was first sung by a chorus of 500 school children. Within the next two decades, it became  known as the Negro anthem. And in 1919, though it rejected the idea of a separate “anthem” for African Americans, the NAACP declared Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing as its official song.

The poem was written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, Rosamond. It's impact on Americans cannot be disputed.