Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Paradoxically, the same genomic arguments about the nonexistence of biologically differentiated racial categories can work in a different way to re-racialize Brazilian society. The genetic data are used to argue that everyone is more or less mixed and that Brazil is a heterogeneously mestiço nation. But this argument easily resonates, in the wider public sphere, with a racialized conception of the nation, understood as a population that has been constituted by the mixture of three original racial stocks: the concept of ‘mestiço’ has great difficulty in shaking off its racialized genealogy (Young, 1995), even if the geneticists argue that race has no biological reality in general and specifically in Brazil. Thus, the re-geneticization of the social order makes more available new types of genetic data and idioms to think about social identities: the identity of mestiço, which is deeply racialized, is validated in genetic terms, even as race itself and racial differences are denied.
University of Arkansas Press
September 2015
Produced by James Greeson
Associate Producer – Dale Carpenter
Narrated by Julia Sampson
Running Time: 00:57:00
DVD ISBN: 978-1-68226-006-7
Born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas to extraordinary parents, Florence B. Price became the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra when the Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony at the 1933 World’s Fair. Price’s remarkable achievements during the racist “Jim Crow” era were a testament to her gifts. This is the inspiring story of one woman’s triumph over prejudice and preconceptions.
In addition to the 57 minute feature film it includes six bonus features of fine performances of recently discovered Florence Price compositions and a commentary about the recent discovery of Price materials which are part of the Florence Price collection at the University of Arkansas.
Price’s Second Violin Concerto explores unstable harmonic terrain. Illustration by Paul Rogers
How an African-American composer’s works were saved from destruction.
In 2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. The structure was in poor condition: vandals had ransacked it, and a fallen tree had torn a hole in the roof. In a part of the house that had remained dry, the Gatwoods made a curious discovery: piles of musical manuscripts, books, personal papers, and other documents. The name that kept appearing in the materials was that of Florence Price. The Gatwoods looked her up on the Internet, and found that she was a moderately well-known composer, based in Chicago, who had died in 1953. The dilapidated house had once been her summer home. The couple got in touch with librarians at the University of Arkansas, which already had some of Price’s papers. Archivists realized, with excitement, that the collection contained dozens of Price scores that had been thought lost. Two of these pieces, the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, have recently been recorded by the Albany label: the soloist is Er-Gene Kahng, who is based at the University of Arkansas.
The reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find. In a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced herself thus: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” She plainly saw these factors as obstacles to her career, because she then spoke of Koussevitzky “knowing the worst.” Indeed, she had a difficult time making headway in a culture that defined composers as white, male, and dead. One prominent conductor took up her cause—Frederick Stock, the German-born music director of the Chicago Symphony—but most others ignored her, Koussevitzky included. Only in the past couple of decades have Price’s major works begun to receive recordings and performances, and these are still infrequent.
The musicologist Douglas Shadle, who has documented the vagaries of Price’s career, describes her reputation as “spectral.” She is widely cited as one of the first African-American classical composers to win national attention, and she was unquestionably the first black woman to be so recognized. Yet she is mentioned more often than she is heard. Shadle points out that the classical canon is rooted in “conscious selection performed by individuals in positions of power.” Not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history…
