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“I'm Workin’ on My Buildin”: Freedom and Foundation-Building in Florence Price's Two Violin Fantasies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2023

Katharina Uhde Open the ORCID record for Katharina Uhde [Opens in a new window]  and
R. Larry Todd
Katharina Uhde*
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN, USA
R. Larry Todd
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
*
Email: katharina.uhde@valpo.edu
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Abstract

Florence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , August 2023 , pp. 243 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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Footnotes

The present article is a reworking of a lecture recital presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in 2022.

References

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