Price: Song Without Words in A Major

Description

Florence Price's Song Without Words in A Major was composed on 21 April 1932. It was thus apparently Price's second contribution to the genre — the first being the G-Major Song without Words that, according to its autograph, was "composed in 1928 or [the] early '30's [sic]." Stylistically, the two are cut from the same cloth — short, lyrical pieces for piano solo that, after the model of the Lieder ohne Worte first cultivated by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Felix in the 1820s, imitate the textures of a solo song or vocal duet with piano accompaniment. Yet the A-Major composition is the more self-assured of the two. Like its G-Major predecessor, it entrusts the melody almost exclusively to the right hand and is cast in a ternary form whose middle section is related to that of the main sections by a third (C-sharp Minor in this case). But the melodies of the A-Major Song without Words are more expansive, with more broadly arching phrases and more developed cadences. of particular note in the A-Major Song without Words are mm. 40-51. Up until this point, the piece has proceeded in mostly regular and clearly balanced two- and four-bar phrases — and in the hands of a lesser composer it might have continued to do so from here on as well. But Price chooses instead to suspend this regular forward movement. Instead, she gives us a distended cadential prolongation launched by a long chromatic descent in the inner voices and moving through a sumptuously voiced ascending arpeggio to a gradual slowing of the note-values before, finally, offering the expected authentic cadence in mm. 49-51. The result is that despite its pervasive lyricism, the A-Major Song without Words also has a clearly dramatic shape that provides a strong sense of built-up expectations and delayed resolution — Price's way of imparting her characteristic sure-fire sense of dramatic pacing to a genre whose heritage typically privileged lyricism over drama.

— John Michael Cooper