black history month – Tiny Village Music

Continuing the series of ukulele arrangements by Ross Malcolm Boyd for Black History Month, here is the next video.

Florence Beatrice Price was an American composer, born in Little Rock, Arkansas on April 9, 1887. Her mother was a music teacher who helped guide Florence’s early musical education. Her first composition was published at age 11, and only a few years later she was enrolled at the New England Conservatory, majoring in piano and organ.

Due to the attitude toward African-Americans at the time, Price pretended to be Mexican. In 1906 she graduated with honors. After winning first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards in 1932 for her Symphony in E Minor, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the piece in 1933.

This would establish Florence B. Price as the first African-American woman to have a composition played (not to mention premiered!) by a major orchestra.

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In honor of Black History Month, Ross’ weekly ukulele video series (follow Tiny Village Music or Ross Malcolm Boyd on Facebook to keep up with these) features Ross’ arrangements of musical selections by black composers.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer, born in London on August 15, 1875. His father was a physician from Sierra Leone who, unable to pursue a career in Britain presumably due to racial prejudice, returned to West Africa, leaving behind his wife and son.

As a child, Samuel played the violin and sang with the choir of a church in Croydon. He was admitted to the Royal College of Music in 1890. A professor at the college, in teaching Coleridge-Taylor the music of Brahms, suggested that it would be impossible to write a quintet for clarinet and strings without being influenced by Brahms’s composition for that combination of instruments. Coleridge-Taylor took the assertion as a challenge and produced a work that received the respect of his professor and later audiences.

By 1896 he was teaching, conducting, and judging music festivals in addition to composing. His work was very well regarded, the most successful of which was The Hiawatha Trilogy (based on the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), The Death of Minnehaha (1899), and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900). Europe wasn’t the only place Coleridge-Taylor found success. He was welcomed during his tours of the US between 1904 and 1910. American musicians dubbed him the “Black Mahler.” He was invited to the White House to visit President Theodore Roosevelt.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, only 37 years old, died of pneumonia on September 1, 1912. He was survived by his wife, Jessie Walmisley, his son, Hiawatha, and his daughter, Gwendolyn, known as Avril.

Hear Ross’ ukulele arrangement of a selection from Coleridge-Taylor here.

#ukulele #ukulelesunday #blackcomposers #blackhistorymonth #samuelcoleridgetaylor #willowsong