2025-2026 Season Special Events
Jessie Montgomery Strum for string quartet
Florence Price Octet for Brasses and Piano
Adoration
String Quartet No. 2
This concert will last approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Let Freedom Ring celebrates the artistry and resilience of African American women who helped shape the sound of American classical music. Their music stands proudly alongside the great works of the European tradition, offering new colors, rhythms, and stories that enrich our shared musical heritage.
The concert opens with Strum by Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981), a work bursting with energy, warmth, and rhythmic vitality. Written for string quartet, Strum draws on American folk traditions and the spirit of community that runs through Montgomery’s music, setting a joyful tone for the evening.
The program then turns to the trailblazing Florence Price (1887-1953), the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major U.S. orchestra. Her music, lush and full of heart, weaves together classical traditions with the sounds of spirituals and folk melodies. Her Octet for Brasses and Piano (1930) highlights her expressive, distinctive voice, while the tender Adoration (1951), performed by the Portsmouth Brass Ensemble under the direction of John Page, offers a moment of quiet grace.
The Expansion Quartet closes the program with Price’s String Quartet No. 2, a deeply expressive work that captures both her technical brilliance and her emotional depth – music that continues to resonate nearly a century after it was written.
As Florence Price herself once wrote in a 1943 letter to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky:
“I should like to be judged on merit alone – on the basis of the work I submit; and not on the basis of race or sex… Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic, and virility. Add to that the incident of race – I have Colored blood in my veins – and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”
Her words remind us how much strength, talent, and conviction it took for her music – and the music of so many others – to be heard. Let Freedom Ring honors that legacy with performances that celebrate both the struggle and the joy that continue to shape American music today.
