by David Patrick Stearns

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas once provocatively proclaimed that recordings should be made to self-destruct after a handful of hearings — just so audiences wouldn’t lock their ears into any one way of listening, whether to performances or to new music.

That’s not exactly what has happened in the four decades since MTT startled listeners who were hanging onto their Arturo Toscanini albums for the rest of their lives (or so they thought). But the recording world (and the inner politics that go with it) now hosts such a plurality of diverse voices — with streaming services, YouTube, and traditional recording companies in full cry — we’re discovering and rediscovering music well beyond what Toscanini and the record executives were willing to put into the marketplace. Once-lost composers from recent and ancient times suddenly benefit from what once counted against them — amid changing social awareness.

Consider the case of Florence Price (1887–1953). Up until a year or so ago, that name was virtually unknown. Now her chamber music has been on some of the first live concerts in New York since the lockdown (including her String Quartet No. 1 by the Harlem Chamber Players), and her Symphony No. 1 will be streamed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin on November 26. Her status as a pioneering African American woman composer certainly boosts her stock amid the time of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, though such social movements are only the starting points. 

Composer Julius Eastman (1940–90) was a walking taboo as a gay, black, sexual radical who died of AIDS, but whose pieces fiercely confronted stereotypes — and in a post-minimalist musical language that now feels perfectly in step with the current Bang on a Can composers. 

At the distant other end of the telescope is music by the first known women composers in America, from the Ephrata Cloister Meetinghouse near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They’re heard in the upcoming Voices in the Wilderness on the Bright Shiny Things label, having been excavated from the 1746 Ephrata Codex in the Library of Congress by baritone / musicologist Christopher Dylan Herbert (best known as a member of New York Polyphony). No longer are recordings just about exposure. Time and again, current composers talk about how the cognitive understanding of their music seems to burgeon once a recording is out there in the ethers.

In decades past, classical recordings were synonymous with dead composers and artists with a European pedigree — and not always because they were good, but because they were dependable. Many of what we now call classic recordings came out in the LP era when the big-five American orchestras ruled, issuing performances that had an air of permanence as something you would always have. Lip service was paid to new music, though not very well: Robert Craft recorded Schoenberg with time left over from the latest Stravinsky outing because that was all he was given.

Whether blatant prejudice or conservative marketing, not even the powerful Leopold Stokowski could record the African American composers he championed (such as William Grant Still). But now, such barriers are sidestepped by far more numerous entry points. Major labels have maintained a powerful place in the industry, but they’re far from the only thing out there. The era of self-produced recordings, ushered in by LSO Live!, allowed major symphonies by major artists to be delivered at a lower price, so buyers could take a chance on something they only might want to hear two or three times. The world has also become populated by boutique labels that will issue all manner of recordings, often handed to them ready-made by the artists with no overhead cost, and issued with a curatorial sensibility that’s considerably less narrow than major labels of the past.

How Florence Price, Julius Eastman, and the women of the 18^th-century Ephrata Cloister Meetinghouse so readily find a place in this world still requires some explaining, especially since none of them have had anything resembling the same route to visibility.

Price had early successes with her Symphony No. 1 premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. But the burdens of racism and sexism were multiplied as she found herself in some artistic dead ends that maybe didn’t guarantee her obscurity, but certainly encouraged it. Studying with the esteemed-but-retro composer George W. Chadwick at the New England Conservatory meant that her creative personality was formed at a time when Dvořák, who encouraged the use of spirituals in symphonic music, was the lingua franca of American composers. Less than a decade after her Symphony No. 1 success, the voice of America was radically changed by Aaron Copland, who was later swept aside by the avant-gardists of the 1960s, who needed to re-invent music to be considered legitimate. Price was light years away.

Now, with neo-tonalist composers in fashion, the fact that Price picked up where Dvořák left off is a plus. But what captured public attention the most is the 2019 Naxos-label recording of her Symphonies No. 1 and 4 with a cover photo of Price that allowed you to put a thoughtful face with the music. With much of her orchestral output discovered in, of all places, the small town of St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009, she is now represented by the major publisher G. Schirmer. Posthumously, Florence Price is now firmly established.

If only Julius Eastman had his version of Price’s St. Anne discovery. Instead, a lion’s share of his scores were apparently lost in a New York apartment eviction and probably ended up in a dumpster. Though a faculty member at the University of Buffalo during its new-music heyday, Eastman decamped to 1980s New York City — a place that didn’t encourage his healthiest instincts, leaving him brilliant, charismatic, and homeless. His reputation was rescued by the small new-music label New World, whose three-disc 2005 set Eastman: Unjust Malaise included some recordings of pieces whose scores were apparently lost. 

The sales can’t have been much, but the disc was posted on YouTube and heard by the kind of people who could resurrect more of Eastman’s music. Festivals of his music presented by the Philadelphia cutting-edge organization Bowerbird gave Eastman the kind of electric performances they deserved. The 2015 book Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, edited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (University of Rochester Press), pieced together parts of his life from his contemporaries — before the trail grew cold. More tapes turned up, and his hard-driving minimalist pieces are “reverse engineered,” with scores constructed as accurately as possible from recordings.

The Voices in the Wilderness disc came about when Herbert was researching in the Library of Congress in 2017, and the discovery that the Ephrata Cloister Meetinghouse hymns, attributed to male church elders, actually had authors such as “Sisters Forben, Hanna and Ketura.” What little is known of them suggests some were only in their 20s when their contributions made it into the manuscript.  

The hymns are written according to such a prescribed format of simple, four-part harmony, they aren’t likely to be a feminist game changer. But what lies beyond the “firstness” is a glimpse into a sect whose members prepared to meet their maker leading celibate lives, wearing uniform white robes and eating only as much as they needed to function. What you hear, then, is a simplicity born out of complete devotion and certainty about the workings of heaven and earth. It’s music that becomes disarming for demanding so little as far as notes and rests are concerned.

The bonus in these recordings is the little-known worlds they allow you to visit. Eastman captures and distills that sleazy, crazy, sexy, let’s-try-anything era of pre-AIDS New York. Few Dvořák-era American composers are heard today, and now we have an entire output that realizes Dvořák’s vision of an American music based in African American sensibility.

So we aren’t just listening to music here. We’re time traveling into people’s souls.

Via