Florence Price

Florence Price (born April 9, 1887, Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.—died June 3, 1953, Chicago, Illinois) was an American composer and pianist whose work spans three decades, during which she wrote more than 300 musical compositions. In 1933, she became the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. In 2009, the discovery of unpublished scores and manuscripts by Price sparked renewed interest in her work.

Early life and education

Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to James Smith and Florence (née Gulliver) Smith. Her father was a dentist who, after his office building was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, moved to southern Arkansas and eventually relocated to Little Rock, where he established a new practice. At the time, he was one of only a handful of African American dentists in the United States. Her mother was a businesswoman, schoolteacher, and piano tutor who guided Smith to her first piano recital at age four. The Smiths were part of an elite African American community in Little Rock, and they lived in a lavish home, complete with a library, carpeted floors, and an Ivers & Pond piano. The family hosted notable guests, such as concert pianist John (“Blind”) Boone, who also served as a mentor to Smith.

Smith graduated from high school at the age of 14 as the valedictorian of her class. In 1903 she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she majored in organ performance and piano teaching. During this time she also studied, privately, under composer George Whitefield Chadwick and started to experiment with incorporating the sounds of African American folk music into her developing musical oeuvre. At the behest of her mother, Smith kept her African American heritage hidden from her peers. She graduated in 1906 and soon returned to Arkansas, where she taught at the Cotton Plant Academy in Cotton Plant for a year before moving on to Shorter College in North Little Rock, where she taught until 1910.

Career and personal life

The year 1910 was a difficult one for Smith. Her father died, and after his death her mother abandoned the family and never contacted Smith again. That same year Smith was appointed chair of the music department at Clark College (now part of Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta. In 1912 she married lawyer Thomas Price and moved back to Little Rock. The couple had a son, who died during infancy, and two daughters. Growing racial tensions, including a lynching near her husband’s office, eventually pushed the Price family out of Little Rock. They settled in Chicago in 1927.

In Chicago, Price was quickly accepted into a vibrant community of African American musicians and composers amid the Chicago Black Renaissance movement. Her home was the site of constant creative activity. She set up a private piano studio and offered lessons to children. She was also able to resume studying music, this time at the American Conservatory of Music and Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts), and she began to make contact with local music publishers. In 1928 four of her pieces were published, including At the Cotton Gin: A Southern Sketch for Piano. She established a successful commercial relationship with the McKinley Music Company, which published her compositions for children, such as Playful Rondo (1928) and Mellow Twilight (1930). She also wrote popular music and radio advertisement jingles under the pseudonym VeeJay. Price and her husband divorced in 1931, and later that year she married insurance agent Pusey Dell Arnett.

In 1932 the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation sponsored composing competitions in Chicago, and Price won awards for her Symphony No. 1 in E Minor and Piano Sonata in E Minor. Symphony No. 1 in E Minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on June 15, 1933, making Price the first African American woman composer to have a symphony premiered by a major American orchestra. The Chicago Daily News praised the composition as “a faultless work,…a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion. Miss Price’s symphony is worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertory.” Recognition for Symphony No. 1 in E Minor established Price’s reputation as a composer and arranger. In 1934 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her composition Piano Concerto in One Movement, and in 1939 contralto singer Marian Anderson delivered a stirring performance of Price’s arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” at the Lincoln Memorial Concert in Washington, D.C., which was attended by more than 75,000 people. Price’s Symphony No. 3 was premiered by the Detroit Civic Orchestra in 1940.

Price’s compositions are notable for integrating the rhythms and melodies of African American spirituals, blues, and folk music with the European symphonic tradition, and her work was particularly influenced by the orchestral works of Antonín Dvořák. However, despite her talent and innovations as a composer, most of her later work was overlooked or ignored by classical music performers and institutions of the time. In a 1943 letter to Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Price wrote, “Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility. Add to that the incident of race—I have Colored blood in my veins—and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.” Price continued composing in the 1940s and early ’50s. She completed her Fourth Symphony in 1945, but it failed to gain traction and was never performed during her lifetime.

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Price died from a stroke in 1953, and her music was mostly forgotten after her death. However, in 2009 a couple who was renovating the Price family’s former vacation home in St. Anne, Illinois, found a trove of Price’s sheet music and manuscripts that were thought to have been lost, including two violin concertos. The discovery led to renewed interest in Price’s work. In 2018 violinist Er-Gene Kahng and the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava recorded her Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. Later that year the music publishing company G. Schirmer, Inc., acquired the worldwide rights to Price’s catalog and began publishing her solo piano compositions and other works. The International Florence Price Festival, which honors Price’s contributions to classical music, was launched virtually in August 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was also celebrated in Washington, D.C., in 2021. In 2022 the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor and Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, won a Grammy Award for best orchestral performance.