Music we almost missed

The Wycliffe College professor of historical theology Ephraim Radner generated a buzz among classical music aficionados in April with First Things article “Music That Is Never Heard.”

Framed with two poignant anecdotes—one about the doomed German Jewish composer James Simon, who “scribb[led] out a piece of music” even as he awaited the train to Auschwitz, and another about the Comanche composer David Yeagley, who died in 2014 “surrounded by boxes and boxes” of music to which he’d devoted himself but “that no one had seen and no one will hear”—the essay explored with sensitivity and wisdom the ultimate meaning of musical trees that fall in uninhabited forests.

In the context of Radner’s ruminations, the latest albums by the pianist Samantha Ege and the Habemus (string) Quartet seem especially providential.

Not everything on Ege’s Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price was in danger of going unheard. Florence Price’s 10-minute Fantasie Nègre No. 1 in E Minor, based on the melody of the spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” has been known since Margaret Bonds premiered it decades ago. But the nine Price compositions constituting the album’s other 44 minutes, discovered in 2009 (56 years after Price’s death), came perilously close.

Price made history in 1933 when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony No. 1 in E Minor and made her the first black American woman to have one of her symphonies performed by a major ensemble. This accomplishment and several first-prize contest finishes aside did little to stem the neglect to which being a woman of color in the pre–Civil Rights era consigned her.

Ege discovered Price while an undergraduate, eventually making the composer the focus of her Ph.D. It’s therefore no surprise that Ege’s self-penned liner notes percolate with intimate erudition. But they’re a shadow compared with the full-bodied effervescence of her playing.

“Price,” writes Ege, “had faith that a very beautiful and very American music could emerge from [America’s] melting pot.” And whether capturing the ever-shifting flashes of Price’s four Fantasies Nègres or the briefer sparkle of her “Snapshots” and “Untitled Sketches,” Ege more than justifies her heroine’s convictions.

The rich, moving, and new music on the Habemus Quartet’s Whispering Colors: Consonant Chamber Music for the 21st Century grew out of a chamber-music composition contest sponsored by the Spanish composer Jorge Grundman’s Non Profit Music Foundation. Its criterion? “Exceptional communicative quality.”

It’s a quality that Whispering Colors’ nine pieces (by eight still-living composers) possess in abundance, their predominantly legato phrasing serving as a metaphor for the unity that once existed between serious music and serious listeners and that can exist again.