“There were two composers in the Schumann household,” writes Joshua Kosman in Tuesday’s (9/21) San Francisco Chronicle. “There was Clara, who had already made an international career as a piano virtuoso before she was out of her teens, and her husband Robert, whose career took longer to get off the ground. Yet whenever you see the name ‘Schumann’ by itself … you can be pretty sure which one they mean…. Who gets last-name-only treatment and who requires a full identification is a weightier, more politically fraught question than it might initially seem…. Composers who are on a last-name-only basis are the inner circle, the established voices, the aesthetic power base…. As challenges to the canon, and indeed to the very idea of a canon, become more widespread—as performers and listeners grow increasingly insistent on providing space for undersung and unsung musical voices—decisions about one name versus two names become more urgent…. Perhaps only the gradual, inevitable recalibration of our musical life will resolve the tension. With enough performances and communal exploration—when her Third Symphony, for instance, finally takes its rightful place in the concert repertoire—Florence Price will become simply Price.”
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