The Tom Brady of Composers

By Glen Nelson

On Christmas Eve, The New York Times ran an article about professionals who, relative to their peers, are, let’s just say, very experienced. Eight professionals were featured: The Tom Brady of Bakers, The Tom Brady of Doctors, etc. The Tom Brady of Composers is the LDS master, Deon Nielsen Price, from Arroyo Grande, California. The median age of female musicians is 55. Price, at age 88, is decades beyond that. What the profile does not mention in detail is her busy schedule of composing and recording new works. In January, her latest album, Rendezvous, will be released, and it contains four works which continue her long and distinguished path of socially-aware and engaged music. The first work on the album, for string ensemble, is inspired by Ila Mae Richardson’s poem about allowing life’s troubles to be reframed as blessings; the second, for countertenor and chamber symphony, is a tribute to Beethoven on the 250th anniversary of his birth. Behind Barbed Wire follows; it is scored for saxophone and piano with haiku and tanka poetry to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the executive order forcing Japanese Americans into incarceration camps. 

Finally, is the four-movement Chamber Symphony Inspired by Hildebrando de Melo’s Nzambi (God) Paintings. Here, played by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra and led by artistic director Philip Nuzzo, Price takes the Angolan painter’s works as a starting point—she saw them at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts  2018 festival in New York—and orients them to a personal response to Covid-19: “Pathos”; “Compassion”; “Quest”; and “Felicity”. The world has lost nearly 7 million people from the pandemic. To put that tragic figure into perspective, more than 100 countries in the world have total populations below that number. This is an elegy full of compassion and global relevance. (Rendezvous is available on CD from Cambria Records and becomes available on Spotify in early January).