Capitalism and the Future of American Classical Music Scholarship

Abstract

Perhaps no historical composer has sparked more public interest in recent memory than Florence Price (1888–1953). Since 2018, when Alex Ross of the New Yorker and musicologist Micaela Baranello reported on the world premiere recording of Price’s two violin concertos in expansive contextual essays, global performances of her music have skyrocketed, even despite the COVID19 pandemic. As one scholar among many endeavoring to build on biographical work by pioneers like Barbara Garvey Jackson, Mildred Denby Green, and Rae Linda Brown, I’ve come face to face with impediments to scholarship on American classical music embedded in the webs of contemporary global capitalism manifested in the classical music industry. This essay offers reflections on a few of these challenges. Documents in the Rae Linda Brown papers held at Emory University indicate that Price scholars and performers ran into significant difficulty discerning who managed the rights to Price’s catalog after her daughter’s death in 1975. By the mid1990s, however, one of Price’s grandchildren had teamed with Brown to negotiate with publishers on the Price estate’s behalf, thus solving a major quandary. During the two decades prior to Brown’s tragic death in 2017, Barbara Garvey Jackson’s boutique publishing house, ClarNan Editions, released nearly thirty editions of Price’s smaller works, while Brown herself edited Price’s Sonata in E Minor and two of her symphonies for G. Schirmer and AR Editions, respectively. Even so, a substantial percentage of Price’s catalog remained