An American Renaissance
Janai Brugger
Songs by Florence Price and Billy Strayhorn
AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
Janai Brugger
Songs by Florence Price and Billy Strayhorn.
The music in this project was written by two giants of African American music who are associated with the artistic revival that flourished during the first half of the 20th century in Harlem and Chicago.
The Harlem Renaissance lasted from 1917 to 1935 and was recognized internationally for its indelible impact on American arts and culture. In Chicago, an equally powerful but lesser-known creative force emerged on the South Side during the 1930s and continued through the 1950s. Chicago’s Renaissance produced visual artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals who explored new definitions of the black aesthetic, experimented with style, and delivered compelling portrayals of life brimming with complexity.
This Renaissance was underpinned by seismic social and cultural changes that engulfed Chicago’s community, beginning with the Great Migration when tens of thousands of Southern blacks flooded into the city. Life for migrants on the segregated South Side could be harsh and unforgiving. Overcrowding, joblessness, and poverty were facts of life. Later, the Great Depression also battered black Chicago. However, out of the hardship came new ideas and community institutions. Racial pride and a new black consciousness emerged while political thought shifted toward activism.
Social and cultural institutions provided a platform for the community’s artistic efforts. Lectures, readings, and discussion groups were frequently offered. Theater troupes explored works by black playwrights. Art was put on public display. Jazz, blues, and new gospel music inspired artists’ work.
The dynamic creativity of this movement placed Chicago at the center of urban African American art, blues and jazz, dance, theater, literature, and sociological study during a time of cultural change in American history.
Florence Price was born into an integrated community in Little Rock, Arkansas, April 9, 1887, and began learning piano from her mother before the age of four. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music at sixteen in 1903 and graduated in three years. As racial tensions, Jim Crow, and lynchings escalated in Little Rock, Price moved with her husband and two daughters to Chicago in 1927. There, she became acquainted with the Chicago Music Association, which found venues for classically-trained black musicians. As a composer, Price was associated with the Renaissance along with other musicians like Theodore Charles Stone, Nora Holt, Margaret Bonds, and many more.
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
10 Songs by Florence Price for Soprano & Orchestra
By any measure, a Florence Beatrice Price renaissance is well underway. Seven decades since her death, and nine since the groundbreaking premiere of Symphony in E minor, her luminous music continues to captivate audiences worldwide. While her symphonic works have been performed regularly in recent years, her Art Songs – mostly written for voice and piano – have not benefited from the same level of exposure in concert halls.
Price’s art songs touch upon themes of love, spirituality, and the African American experience. Her compositions reflect the struggles and triumphs of her community in a racially divided society. Through her music she brought to light the beauty and resilience of her community, while her art songs in particular served as a platform for cultural expression and empowerment.
Price’s chosen texts came from a variety of poets with whom she had shared heritage: Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon among others. In terms of themes, her art songs tend to belong to either the Classical – drawing inspiration from European art song traditions, and often featuring themes of love, nature and introspection, or the Spiritual – deeply rooted in African American tradition, experiences and rich cultural history.
For this newly orchestrated collection of songs, I decided to focus on the first category as I felt they present a glimpse into her inner-self, and the exceptional ability to connect with listeners on a deeply emotional level. My intent was to achieve an arc of a life-well-lived: starting with dreams and aspirations, going through struggles and triumphs, and lastly – arriving at a peaceful return home, which could also be interpreted as an end of life’s journey.
This collection’s title, “The Heart of a Woman”, is taken from one of Price’s most provocative songs. It is a setting of a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson. In it, a woman’s heart is compared to a lone bird that wings “forth with the dawn” over “life’s turrets and vales”. It then “falls back with the night / And enters some alien cage in its plight / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars”.
Other songs are centered around dreams and aspirations, for example My Dream, with its soaring melodies and evocative harmonies, paints a vivid picture of a dream world, transporting the listener to a realm of enchantment. Delicately balanced between beauty and melancholy, it skillfully captures the complexities of human emotion.
Another aspect of Price’s dream world is articulated in the poem Dream Ships by Langston Hughes, where dreams take the form of ships which sail through the vast ocean of possibilities – symbolizing the aspirations and ambitions of individuals striving for a better future. Hughes’ evocative language and imagery invite readers to imagine themselves aboard these vessels, reminding us of the importance of holding onto our dreams and believing in their transformative power.Other works by Langston Hughes include Songs to the Dark Virgin, which was premiered by Marian Anderson in 1940 and was dedicated to the diva. It is a powerful and thought-provoking poem that challenges societal norms and beauty standards by celebrating the beauty and strength of dark-skinned Black women. In his words, Hughes conveys the resilience and grace of women who have often been marginalized and overlooked. It is a tribute to the inner strength and beauty that exists within all individuals, regardless of their skin color.
To My Little Son depicts a mother’s love for her son and the bond that exists between them. Price uses romantic harmonies to set the two-verse ballad in which she indulges in word painting as the mother gazes into her young child’s face, dreaming of his future. Sadly, Price never had a chance to experience the sentiments expressed in this poem. She suffered one of her greatest personal tragedies early on in her marriage when her son died while an infant.
Beside the Sea explores the themes of love and connection and the essence of longing and desire as the narrator expresses a yearning to be with their loved one by the sea. The imagery of waves, sand, and seagulls creates a sensory tableau, inviting us to feel the presence of the sea and the depth of their emotions. Furthermore, the poem suggests that love can transcend physical boundaries, highlighting the power of love to create a sense of unity and bring comfort, even in times of separation.
In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Poet and His Song, the composer beautifully captures the essence of the poetic process, emphasizing the importance of the poet’s role in giving voice to emotions and experiences that may otherwise remain unexpressed. The poem also suggests poetry has the power to bring solace, joy, and enlightenment to both the poet and their audience.
Price’s versatility is perhaps mostly noticeable in Don’t You Tell Me No. This song falls into a family of lighthearted pieces that Price apparently composed for the musical theater and is an exception in this Cycle. The lyrics are Price’s own – which was not a common practice for her – and the music includes references to cakewalk and ragtime styles.
The cycle ends with Travel’s End, Mary Folwell Hoisington’s poem. It is narrated by a weary traveller who longs to sleep peacefully, as they did once in their childhood bed. Price’s hymn-like piano accompaniment creates a prayerful atmosphere for the protagonist to confess in the final line: “I would that your sheet might be my shroud / And I in earth be laid.”
Lior Rosner
Orchestrator and Curator
The Heart of a Woman
10 Songs by Florence Price for Soprano & Orchestra
(Demo Recording)
Rehearsal of “To My Little Son” with the MSO
and maestro Thomas Søndergård
THREE SONGS BY BILLY STRAYHORN
for Soprano & Chamber Orchestra
These three songs by Billy Strayhorn represents some of his most well known works, and their complexity and depth put them at the highest artistic achievements in popular music.
A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing
Within months of joining Duke Ellington in New York in the winter of 1939, Strayhorn had written this ballad for Johnny Hodges, the Ellington orchestra’s star alto saxophonist. Throughout ‘A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,’ Strayhorn maintains a subdued and minor mood. As always, his writing is detailed and effectively expressive of the emotional content of this introspective composition. In ’65, the orchestra recorded it with Ella Fitzgerald singing the tune with lyrics Strayhorn added later. The text is thematically as romantic as the title implies: An innocent description of different kinds of flowers and their attributes.
Lush Life
Strayhorn was a teenager when he wrote most of the song, which was to become his signature composition. The pun in the song’s title suggests that Lush Life might be speaking of a life of elegance, or perhaps of boozy despair. In both senses, the song reflects the life of the man who wrote it, the lyric revealing both poetry and a maturity that’s surprising coming from a teenager.
The lyric describes the author’s weariness of the night life after a failed romance, wasting time with “jazz and cocktails” at “come-what-may places” and in the company of girls with “sad and sullen gray faces/with distingué traces”.
The song’s verse is 32 bars long, and its chorus is 24 bars. Unlike most other jazz standards with a verse and a chorus, Lush Life is never performed without the verse because it is completely integral to the composition. Jazz critic Ted Gioia calls this standard “an art song, not a pop tune.”
Lotus Blossom
The inspiration for the song may have come from a place important to Strayhorn long before he wrote Lotus Blossom in the 1940s. Perhaps as an escape from his alcoholic father, Strayhorn spent a great deal of time in his grandmother’s garden, which may have inspired not just this song, but also his songs Violet Blue, Passion Flower, and A Flower is a Lovesome Thing.
Duke Ellington liked the song so much that it eventually became the sign-off song at the end of each of his band’s performance. It is his recording of Lotus Blossom that may be the best of the many covers that exist. He said that it was the song that Strayhorn liked to hear him play the most. After Strayhorn died from cancer of the esophagus on May 31, 1967, Ellington and some of the band went into the recording studio in August to make a tribute album of some of Strayhorn’s lesser-known songs. When the session for the album And His Mother Called Him Bill was over, Ellington went back to the piano. As he sat there alone, he began to play Lotus Blossom.
Although it was an instrumental piece its belcanto-like melody leads itself naturally and beautifully for a vocalist. The lyrics for the version recorded here were written by Roger Schore and Carol Sloane.
Three Songs by Billy Strayhorn
for Soprano & Orchestra
ABOUT
Janai Brugger, Soprano
A 2026 Grammy award winner and a 2012 winner of Operalia and of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Janai Brugger’s recent season engagments include her highly successful role debut in the title role of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah at Opera Theatre of St Louis. followed by her performances as Pamina The Magic Flute at Ravinia Festival, a role she also sang at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London. Known for her roles in Mozart, the artist sang Pamina Die Zauberflöte, Ilia Idomeneo and Susanna Le Nozze di Figaro at Los Angeles Opera, Zerlina Don Giovanni at Tanglewood with BSO, and Servilia La Clemenza di Tito at Dutch National Opera.
Concert engagements include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Marin Alsop at Ravinia, Poulenc’s Gloria with Orchestre Metropolitain and Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Mahler’s Second Symphony with Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Jader Bignamini conducting.
Metropolitan Opera performances include her role debuts as Liu Turandot, Jemmy Guillaume Tell, Helena The Enchanted Island, Michaela Carmen, Pamina The Magic Flute, Glauce in Cherubini’s Medea Identified by Opera News as one of their top 25 “brilliant young artists” (October 2015 issue), Janai appeared in the Met’s Rising Stars concert series, She also sang performances with Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra both for Mahler’s Fourth Symphony under the baton of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. In her hometown of Chicago she starred in Emmy award-winning composer Laura Karpman’s multimedia setting of Langston Hughes’s epic 1961 poem, Ask your Mama, with Chicago Sinfonietta, and later made her television debut when she sang Karpman’s specially-written requiem, Catch the Fire, for an episode of HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country” memorializing the Tulsa race riots.