Leontyne Price: The Woman of Action behind the Facade of Passive Artistry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Woman of Action Behind the Facade of Passive ArtistryWhen Leontyne Price stepped onto the public stage in the early 1950s, the world had never seen anything quite like her.Even ten years before, the concept of an African American prima donna being paid the Metropolitan Opera's top salary to draw audiences all over the world would likely have been seen as highly improbable, if not impossible.However, Price broke through the boundaries imposed on her because of her heritage to become one of the most sought-after singers of her generation.She has been called the "Prima Donna Assoluta of the international music world" 1 and "the Stradivarius of singers," 2 a woman "born with a miracle of a voice" 3 that many sources describe as being so beautiful that it transcended social prejudices against her skin color and ensured her a place in the history books.While the prejudice-defying qualities of Price's musicality are commonly acknowledged, there is a tendency in the scholarship to portray her contributions to civil rights as a side effect of her musical career, not as an intentional and thoughtful initiative by Price herself.However, a careful survey of Price's actions and publicly voiced opinions reveals that Price's contributions to racial equality were active and intentional.Further, her public persona of pure devotion to her art, "unmarred" by a political agenda, may very well have been carefully cultivated by Price herself to give her art the most power to forward racial equality.Her intelligent management of her career, culminating in her decisive retirement from opera against the expectations of her audience, elevates her legacy from that of a devoted African American artist who incidentally contributes to civil rights simply by being black, to the legacy of an essentially human woman who fought back against the oppressive forces of the majority culture and intelligently cultivated a more inclusive space in society for her African American peers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".