Welcome to our second Composer Spotlight brought to you by OrchestraOne’s own Emma Schmiedecke! This week’s composer is Florence Price (1887 - 1953).

Born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas into a mixed race family, Florence Price rose to become one of the most performed and respected composers of color in America during the first half of the 20th century. By the age of the 14 she had graduated from high school and enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts with a double major in piano and organ; however, at the insistence of her mother, she identified as Mexican in order to hide her African American heritage and avoid the discrimination that would come with it. She studied composition with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, composing her first string trio and symphony before graduating with honors in 1906.

Price returned to the South to become the head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia before marrying lawyer Thomas Price and returning to Little Rock. They lived in Arkansas and had two daughters but, after a series of racially motivated hate crimes, including the lynching of a black man, left in 1927 to escape the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South and settled in Chicago. It was here that Price found more success as a composer and organist. Her first official publication, a set of four pieces for piano, was released in 1928 and she continued her education at the Chicago Musical College, the University of Chicago, and the American Conservatory of Music.

Due to abuse by her husband, she divorced him in 1931 and became a single parent, composing music for radio-ads under a pen name and playing the organ for silent films to make ends meet. She ended up moving in with fellow black composer Margaret Bonds and became immersed in the world of African-American creatives; writer Langston Hughes and soprano Marian Anderson would become good friends.

Price’s big break came in 1932 when she entered the Wanamaker Foundation Awards, winning both first prize for her Symphony in E minor and third prize for her Piano Sonata in the instrumental category. As part of her prize, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, premiered the symphony on June 15, 1933, making Price the first African-American composer to have a composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra.

Highlights of her over 300 work catalogue include for four symphonies, three piano concertos, two violin concertos, string quartets, art songs, and spiritual arrangements, and Price made considerable use of jazz, spirituals, African-American church music and European art music in her compositions. Her compositions were performed by the Works Progress Administration Symphony Orchestra of Detroit, the Chicago Women’s Symphony, and the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago and, in 1940, she was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

 Florence Price died in 1953 at the age of 66 while planning a tour of Europe and her music fell into obscurity, though her legacy continues into the 21st century; in 2009, a collection of her manuscripts was found in a dilapidated house in St. Anne, Illinois. These papers included her two violin concertos and her fourth symphony as well as dozens of other works.

In February 2018, columnist Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker, "not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.” Florence Price became a beacon for African-American classical music in America, making inroads and strides that paved the way for more composers of color, both male and female.

Further reading:

http://www.florenceprice.org/new-page-1

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-rediscovery-of-florence-price

https://www.bsomusic.org/stories/listening-guide-florence-price/

https://americansymphony.org/concert-notes/symphony-no-1-in-e-minor/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Price