Composer Spotlight: Florence Price
Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, AR, to dentist James H. Smith and local music teacher Florence Gulliver. From a young age, Price showed promise academically and artistically. She graduated valedictorian of her class at age 14. Within the heavily segregated community, no other music teacher would accept her, so her mother took on her piano instruction.
Price’s musicality and early mastery earned her a spot at the New England Conservatory at a time when almost no other institutions would accept an African American or a woman as a student. She was sharply aware of the challenges facing her career, as she once noted in a letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzsky: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”
Despite society’s challenges, Price created a large body of compositions, including nearly 20 symphonic works, a dozen choral songs and more than 50 chamber pieces featuring brass band, string quartet, organ, voice and piano. She appears in nearly every list of prominent women in classical music and remains one of the few black women composers to ever be featured by a major orchestra. The Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony in E Minor in 1933; even after a successful and well-received premiere by the CSO, she was often overlooked in her time.
Her music has enjoyed some revival and renewed interest in recent years. In 2018, a large cache of her works were discovered during a renovation of a small house on the outskirts of Chicago. In November, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra performed Price’s Piano Concerto, prompting The New York Times to write, “As Price’s music is increasingly recognized by a previously neglectful classical mainstream, the concerto has begun to see the wider renown it deserves.”
In a classical music world that can be slow to accept a new contributors to its canon, Florence Price is worth a listen. Her works have withstood the prejudices of her time, and they continue to shine as unique and elegant examples of an American master composer in her own right.
The NJSO Chamber Players will feature music by Florence Price, alongside many other female composers, as part of our Celebration of Women concert on March 14 at the Stevens Institute of Technology, part of the OnStage at Stevens series.
Preview the Celebration of Women concert
Preview the concert with this Spotify playlist of works by Florence Price, Caroline Shaw, Fanny Mendelssohn and more: