Michael Cooper's work on Florence Price

Michael Cooper's article, "The Problem with Programs Part 2," (the second of a three-part series) is so very interesting. Why is the overture for a concert given as part of a celebration of "A Century of Progress" at the Chicago World's Fair by John Powell?

[from Wikipedia] Powell became a world-renowned composer.He had a racialist approach to music, which he expressed in his writings. He was interested in Appalachian folk music and championed its performance and preservation. He was one of the founders of the White Top Folk Festival, held in Grayson County, Virginia annually from 1931 to 1939.

Powell's ideology—and musicology—were strongly racialist and anti-black, a topic which served as the subject for many of his essays.[In the fall of 1922 together with Earnest Sevier Cox (a self-proclaimed ethnologist and explorer) and Dr. Walter Plecker, Powell founded the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in Richmond, Virginia. They worked closely with Walter Ashby Plecker to promote state legislation to classify people simply as "white" or "negro", and to end "amalgamation" of the races by intermarriage. The activities of the club split the elite in Virginia, which had tried to take pride in its "genteel paternalism" in controlling racial relations. The clubs attracted more racists.

Within a year, more than 400 white men had joined as members and the club had 31 "posts" in Virginia, including two in Charlottesville, one for the town and one at the University of Virginia. Powell worked with Dr. Plecker, the state's registrar of statistics, to draft the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The club members were successful in lobbying the legislature to gain passage of the act, which classified as black any person with any African ancestry, although the previous law recognized persons with one-sixteenth or less black ancestry as white.

Michael Cooper (this link goes to his blog) has done the extraordinary work of preparing a motherlode of newly-discovered work by Florence Price for publication by G. Schirmer, and leading the way (clearing the way) for a better, and indeed more diverse, musical future for concerts that include early 20th-century music. The tagline on his home page is, "Helping to make unheard music part of our world."

I did, by the way, have a glance at some of Powell's music in the IMSLP. He wrote a nostalgic violin and piano sonata that reflects on the "charms" of old Virginia. It actually looks like a nice piece. But I'm not going to play it. I'm not even going to download the PDF to my computer. Feh.

You can read the first part of Michael Cooper's series here.