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Karen Slack didn’t even hear the full name of her album being read from the stage at the Crypto.com arena at the 67th Grammy Awards.
“I still can’t believe it,” she says months later. “I leap up out of the chair and I’ve got this big, gorgeous gown on... I just felt like I was ten thousand feet above ground. It was extraordinary.”
Slack, alongside pianist Michelle Cann, received music’s highest honour for their debut record Beyond the Years: The Unpublished Songs of Florence Price. The record, created alongside the ONEcomposer artist collective, contains 19 songs by Price, 16 of which were world premiere recordings.
“They went down to the library in Fayetteville because [of] where her papers are at the University of Arkansas,” Slack recalls, “and scanned a ton of scores that they then emailed me.”
Slack got to working on these songs at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where she has served on the voice faculty for the last few years. The natural beauty of the centre helped inspire Slack in putting together the pieces, which capture natural imagery in both music and poetry. “I slow down when I’m in Banff,” says Slack, “and I get to work on other things and I get to focus on other stuff. When I was here in Banff and I was getting my manuscripts for Beyond the Years... I had the time and the space to think about what pieces would work, what pieces didn’t work, how I wanted to curate the album.”
Ultimately, the poems that Slack curated into Beyond the Years spoke to love and nature. “[Price] loved to talk about animals,” smiles Slack. “Those were the poems that she chose that were just rich and very beautiful.”
“A lot of her texts that she chose were very visual, which makes it easier to interpret as the singer,” she continues. “You don’t have to go, ‘Oh, what does this word mean?’”
Slack notes that compositions like these put her in the same song composer category as Franz Schubert or Maurice Ravel, both composers that she programs alongside Price in concerts. Although Price’s legacy remained (however faintly) through the years because of her spiritual arrangement, Slack made an intentional choice to not record them in favour of the art songs. “I wanted all our songs on there to show that Miss Price was a prolific art song composer in the same manner that Schubert and Schumann and Brahms and all these amazing European composers that we know as great songwriters.”
“Miss Price’s music – because it is so rooted in, you know, the Black idiom and the language that she uses and the musical language that she uses is very soulful – it makes it very easy for me.”
In spite of this ease, Slack is also holding responsibility for carrying Price’s legacy and advocating that it should stand alongside the great European masters, especially now that her works have entered the public domain. “I have to take the position that I have been gifted and blessed to be able to uplift. Once I figured out who I was as an artist, and once I started to, yes, the advocacy... it’s just like using the opportunity that I have to share to make the space for as many people as possible.”