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Additional Info
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ComposerFlorence Price
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PublisherG Schirmer Inc
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ArrangementPiano (PF)
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FormatScore
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Genre20th Century
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Additional Contributored. by John Michael Cooper
Description
Your Hands in Mine is the most expansive, and perhaps the most lushly romantic, of the several romance-themed compositions that Price penned in the early 1940s. The work's arching melodies, full textures, throbbing inner voices, wide range, and broad emotional scope, which moves from expansive, full-voiced joy in mm. 14ff to mystery or worry in mm. 37-49 and back again to romantic joy in the closing bars, grant it a position of particular importance among those works. That special status is apparently corroborated by Price's having returned to it four separate times, in two abandoned manuscripts, an initial completed one, and then a fair copy of the completed version. The romantic dimension is especially poignant because the two earliest autographs, both undated (sources AS 1 and AS 2), were abandoned before the work was completed and both titled Memory Lane, while the earlier of the two completed manuscripts (source AS 3), dated November 27, 1943, initially abandoned that title in favor of Your Hands in Mine but later restored the earlier title, and the later of the two completed manuscripts reinstates Your Hands in Mine and drops all reference to Memory Lane: the latter two manuscripts for this avowedly romantic composition date from long after Price's last (documented) romantic relationship — twelve years after her divorce from Thomas Price and about a decade after her separation from Percy Dell Arnett. If one reads the obviously emotional and personal tone of Your Hands in Mine in the context of the fifty-six-year-old Price's own romantic history, then the work's deeply personal musical language, with its frequent exchanges between the baritone and soprano registers and bell-like effects (mm. 19-20, 26-27, 51-52, etc.), lends it an autobiographical significance consistent with its being one of few compositions to which Price returned so often. In any case, the lush harmonies and rich textures of Your Hands in Mine make it one of Price's most sumptuously romantic works for piano solo.
— John Michael Cooper
— John Michael Cooper