Dances in the Canebrakes

Nimble Feet. The opening dance sets a syncopated, off-the-beat tune over a steady walking bass, the rhythm of ragtime but slower and more relaxed than a piano rag. The melody keeps landing just ahead of or behind the beat, which is what gives it its skip. A gentler middle section eases the pace before the opening step returns.

Tropical Noon. The slow movement, warm and unhurried, with a long singing melody over gently rocking accompaniment. In the orchestral version the tune passes between winds and strings, and the harmony leans toward the flattened notes of the blues. It is the moment where the set stops dancing and simply sings.

Silk Hat and Walking Cane. The finale takes its title from a cakewalk, the strutting dance that came out of plantation life and became a ballroom craze around 1900. Listen for the characteristic snap, a short note pushing into a longer one, repeated as a swagger. Price quotes the popular tune "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" along the way, a wink most listeners catch on first hearing. The set ends briskly, in under ten minutes total.

Concerts often program one dance alone, or all three, and both the piano original and the orchestral version circulate.

Florence Price completed Dances in the Canebrakes for solo piano in 1953, the last year of her life. A canebrake is a dense thicket of wild cane, common in the American South where Price grew up; she was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, studied at the New England Conservatory, and settled in Chicago, where in 1933 the Chicago Symphony played her First Symphony, the first work by a Black woman performed by a major American orchestra. The three dances draw on ragtime, the cakewalk, and the juba, dance rhythms Price used throughout her career. Her colleague William Grant Still orchestrated the set, and that version is what most orchestras play today. Much of Price's music went unheard for decades after her death. A cache of her manuscripts was found in an abandoned house near St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009, and the rediscovery helped push her catalog back onto concert programs, where these dances are now among her most frequently scheduled pieces.