Since its founding in 2010 by the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, the Catalyst Quartet has shared an important mission with its parent organization—to promote diversity in classical music.
The quartet continues that mission with the most recent recording in its Uncovered series. The six recordings in the series will showcase neglected chamber works by composers of color. Released earlier this year, Uncovered, Vol. 2 features chamber works—some recorded for the first time—by the noted African American composer Florence B. Price.
Classical 101’s Jennifer Hambrick interviews violinist Karla Donehew Perez about the Catalyst Quartet’s recording Uncovered, Vol. 2, featuring chamber works by Florence B. Price:
The Uncovered recording project stems directly from the Catalyst Quartet’s work with the students of the Sphinx Performance Academy, an annual summer intensive for musicians aged 12-17.
“We felt it was important to bring works by musicians of color alongside all of the standard repertoire, like Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms,” said Karla Donehew Perez, a violinist with the Catalyst Quartet.
In their search for works beyond the standard chamber music repertoire, the quartet musicians found a treasure trove of underperformed works by composers of color.
“We’re just like, this is an incredible work. This is an incredible work. And why don’t people play it? And why isn’t it part of the standard canon?” Donehew Perez said.
After years of unearthing neglected musical gems, in 2018 the Catalyst Quartet launched the Uncovered project to record all of the string quartet chamber music by historically important composers of color.
The recording series will feature chamber works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, George Walker, William Grant Still and Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, in addition to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Vol. 1, released in 2021) and Florence B. Price (Vol. 2).
Donehew Perez says she and her Catalyst Quartet colleagues have encountered some surprising roadblocks in their quest to bring this neglected repertory to light.
“There are no scores for some of these works. There are sometimes scores that have many mistakes, very blatant mistakes that shouldn’t be there,” Donehew Perez said. “And so it’s been a really huge challenge, in that sense, because we want to do these pieces justice, and how can you do that when the parts you’re playing off are terrible and incorrect?”
Beyond doing justice to the works on Uncovered Vol. 2, the recording reclaims what Donehew Perez calls “a lost side of American music,” a distinctive voice in American music that has long been silenced.
“Dvorak himself said that the direction that American music really needed to go in was to seek inspiration from the native peoples and the Spirituals,” Donehew Perez said. “And when you hear Florence Price’s music, you can hear how strong and how powerful that its. And it feels familiar. It feels like something that we know, and yet it’s its own thing.
