DANCES IN THE CANEBRAKES Transcribed (2022) by Darrell Brown (USA, 1976) by FLORENCE BEATRICE PRICE (USA, 1887 – 1953)
- Jan 25
- 5 min read
[#340] Jan 26, 2026
USA | 1953 | Symphonic Band | Grade 4 | 9'30" | Transcription
This piece is available for purchase at Subito Music
Throughout history, transcriptions have been essential to the artistic and cultural development of the wind band. They opened the door to masterpieces otherwise inaccessible to the medium, providing performers and audiences alike with a broader musical heritage. Beyond serving as valuable pedagogical tools, transcriptions demonstrated the wind band’s unique capacity for color, nuance, and expressive depth, thereby legitimizing it as a serious vehicle of artistic expression. In this light, WASBE’s Composition of the Week seeks to honor such works—proposed by colleagues from around the world—that have shaped the repertoire and affirmed the wind band’s enduring role in the wider musical tradition.
Today’s work is proposed by American conductor and educator Darrell Brown.
Dances in the Canebrakes by American composer Florence Beatrice Price is our Composition of the Week.
Florence Price composed Dances in the Canebrakes in its original piano version in 1953, the year of her death following a stroke. As a result, the work holds particular significance as one of her final compositions. It was later orchestrated by the more widely recognized African American composer William Grant Still, who arranged the suite’s three movements.
The rhythmic foundations of the three dances are immediately apparent and draw upon stage and ballroom dance traditions from the era of Scott Joplin (around 1900) and earlier. The first movement, Nimble Feet, is built on the characteristic rhythms of ragtime, interwoven with fragments of a bright, cheerful melody.
The second movement is dominated by the rhythm of the “slow drag,” which supports a dreamy, lyrical theme passed among different sections of the orchestra. A more assertive central passage provides contrast before the movement concludes by merging the contrasting moods in its final section.
The title of the final movement, Silk Hat, and Walking Cane may involve a playful double meaning, as the word “cane” alludes both to fashion and to the canebrakes of the American South. The prevailing rhythm here is the “cakewalk,” a popular ballroom dance of the late nineteenth century. Structured in three sections, the music cleverly blends the flair of theatrical dance with the elegance of fashionable social dancing.
The three movements of the suite are called: 1. Nimble Feet; 2. Tropical Noon; 3. Silk Hat and Walking Cane. The entire work has a duration of 9:30 minutes, and it is scored for standard symphonic band with optional alto clarinet, contrabass clarinet, bass saxophone and cello. It includes a double bass part as well as three percussionists.
Florence Beatrice Price was born one of three children in a mixed-race family. Despite racial issues of the era, her family was well respected and did well within their community. Her father was a dentist, and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. She had her first piano performance at the age of four and went on to have her first composition published at the age of 11.
By the time she was 14, Florence had graduated from Capitol High School at the top of her class and was enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music with a major in piano and organ. Initially, she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the prejudice people had toward African-Americans at the time. At the Conservatory, she was able to study composition and counterpoint with composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Also, while there, she wrote her first string trio and symphony. She graduated in 1906 with honors and both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.
Mr. Price taught in Arkansas briefly before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910, where she became the head of Clark Atlanta University's music department. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer, and moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, the family moved to Chicago, where Florence Price began a new and fulfilling period in her compositional career. She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city including Arthur Olaf Andersen, Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette, and Leo Sowerby, and published four pieces for piano in 1928. While in Chicago, Price was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music.
Price eventually moved in with her student and friend, Margaret Bonds, also a black pianist and composer. This friendship connected Price with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the art world who aided in Price's future success as a composer. Together, Price and Bonds began to achieve national recognition for their compositions and performances. In 1932, both Price and Bonds submitted compositions for Wanamaker Foundation Awards. Price won first prize with her Symphony in E minor, and third for her Piano Sonata, earning her a $500 prize. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, premiered the Symphony on June 15, 1933, making Price’s piece the first composition by an African-American woman to be played by a major orchestra.
Even though her training was steeped in European tradition, Price's music consists of mostly the American idiom and reveals her Southern roots. She wrote with a vernacular style, using sounds and ideas that fit the reality of urban society. Being deeply religious, she frequently used the music of the African-American church as material for her arrangements. At the urging of her mentor George Whitefield Chadwick, Price began to incorporate elements of African-American spirituals, emphasizing the rhythm and syncopation of the spirituals rather than just using the text. Her melodies were blues-inspired and mixed with more traditional, European Romantic techniques. The weaving of tradition and modernism reflected the way life was for African Americans in large cities at the time.
A number of Price's other orchestral works were played by the WPA Symphony Orchestra of Detroit and the Chicago Women’s Symphony. Price wrote other extended works for orchestra, chamber works, art songs, works for violin, organ anthems, piano pieces, spiritual arrangements, four symphonies, three piano concertos, and a violin concerto. Some of her more popular works are: Three Little Negro Dances, Songs to a Dark Virgin, My Soul's Been Anchored in de Lord for piano or orchestra and voice, and Moon Bridge.
Price was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1940 for her work as a composer.
In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers were found in an abandoned house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Ill. These consisted of dozens of her scores, including her two violin concertos and her fourth symphony. As Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, "not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history."
Other works for winds include:
• Fantasie Nègre N°4 (Taylor)
• Juba Dance (Bocook)
• Suite of Dances (Hernandez)
• Three Negro Dances (Leidzén)
More on Florence Price