For the first installment of the Musica Nova concerts series of the semester, Dr. Elizabeth-Jane McGuire and Dr. Betsy Springuel invited pianist Michelle Cann to perform pieces composed by the women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance.
Cann is an award-winning pianist lauded by many organizations and publications for her work in performance and composing. She has played with a number of world-renowned orchestras and is on the piano faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as the inaugural Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies.
This program comprised music by several Black women composers, who were writing in the Chicago music scene around the 1930s and 1940s. Cann explained to the audience that this theme was inspired by one featured composer in particular: Florence Price. Since discovering Price’s music about 10 years ago, Cann has become a leading expert on her work and life. The two Price pieces that featured in the Musica Nova concert were “Fantasie Nègre no. 1” and “Fantasie Nègre no. 2.”
“[Price] actually wrote four fantasies. I did two of them,” Cann explained. “One is missing, sadly, so we only have three that we can play. … Those pieces that I played were some of her more powerful, impressive pieces for piano.”
The entire concert consisted of six pieces and an encore, with Cann discussing the history and legacy of these composers in-between performances. She had in-depth explanations to share on each featured woman and on how they all interacted with or influenced one another during their lifetimes.
“I heard [Price’s] piano concerto, and then I looked for all these other pieces, and I wondered about whether there were other composers out there that were in Chicago, specifically that city,” Cann said. “Through my research, that’s how I came across all the names you saw on this program and all the music that I played.”
The audience was hooked from the moment Cann sat down at the piano to kick off her concert. Students listened intently to each piece, and many joined in a standing ovation to conclude the event.
“What I got really excited about with this series was when I heard that it was for the student and faculty community,” Cann shared. “You don’t see that all the time. For instance, I’ll play with a lot of universities, and it’s a public concert [where] people in the community come and pay tickets. It’s very interesting, I’ll go to a university, and there are hardly any students. But, because the school thinks about students first, I feel like they go out of their way to make [the students] know to come and encourage you to come and hear this music.”
It was extremely encouraging to the professors present to see the level of engagement that Cann received from their students.
“Sometimes [classical music] is viewed as out of reach unless you studied music yourself,” Dr. McGuire said. “But I think music is for everybody. It’s accessible to everybody. I think that’s borne out by the fact that the entire audience stayed the entire time, which I see a lot of these events and they empty halfway through, but this was genuinely riveting.”
McGuire, as one of the organizers, has seen this event series grow and change over the last eight years. However, as a pianist herself, this performance was special.
“The ‘Fantasie Nègre no. 1’ actually took my breath away,” McGuire shared. “I was sitting forward on my seat, watching her perform it. It just seemed almost athletic.”
There is much to learn from the stories of these composers. They were brilliant women who carved out space for their music in a world that wasn’t all that interested in what they had to say. The rediscovery of their music by musicians like Cann is fascinating and essential to the creation of a fuller historical canon that celebrates all its contributors. This concert was one small, but important, step in bringing them to students’ attention and demonstrating their talent nearly 100 years after this music was written.
“Advocacy, I would definitely say that’s the word,” Cann explained what she hopes to be students’ main takeaway. “For me, it was, in my own little way, looking into these composers, doing some research, finding names nobody knew about and saying this music deserves to be heard. I’m going to play it.”
