Price: Child Asleep

Description

Published here for the first time, Price's Child Asleep was composed on July 6, 1932 — the fifteenth birthday of her firstborn daughter, Florence Louise (1917-75). The work bears the sub-heading "To my daughter, Florence" — a circumstance that explains the composition's warm and tender tone. in that first incarnation it was titled Baby Asleep , but Price then (apparently soon after the original composition, judging from the handwriting) revised it and changed its title in that process. This circumstance suggests that the work is a nostalgic reflection on an earlier chapter in the Prices' life — a musical reminiscence of her own motherhood, the family's life in Arkansas, and perhaps also her marriage to Thomas Jewell Price, which had ended in divorce a year earlier, in January, 1931. Like many of Price's compositions, its brevity and unassuming style are deceptive, disguising an ingeniously terraced tonal design that begins and ends with in F Major, but whose middle section suggests (but does not state) the twice-removed tonal center of E-flat Major before moving to the two most remote keys available, first E Major and then G-flat Major via the latter's dominant. But for all this harmonic artifice — the work of a composer of exceptional prowess — the work never loses its lullaby-like air of maternal intimacy and love.

— John Michael Cooper