Florence Beatrice Price
(April 9, 1877 – June 3, 1953)

Florence Beatrice Price (nee Smith) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence’s early musical training. Price gave her first piano recital at the age of four. Upon graduating from high school (as valedictorian, at the age of fourteen!), Price enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from the NEC in 1906 with a Bachelor of Music degree in organ and piano performance.

She returned to Arkansas, where she taught briefly before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910. There she became the head of the music department of Clark Atlanta University. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer. She moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had his practice. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching of a black man in 1927, the Price family decided to leave the south and settled in Chicago.

Florence Price as a teenager

While in Chicago, Price began a period of compositional creativity and study and was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music composition and orchestration.

Financial struggles and abuse by her husband resulted in Price getting a divorce in 1931. She became a single mother to her two daughters. To make ends meet, Price wrote radio jingles, popular songs under the name “Vee Jay” and also accompanied silent films at the organ. She eventually moved in with her student, friend, and fellow composer Margaret Bonds (who was profiled earlier this semester on our blog).

Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. In 1932, Pric submitted compositions for the Wanamaker Foundation Awards. Price won first prize with her Symphony in E minor, and third for her Piano Sonata, earning her a $500 prize. Her symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and she was catapulted into her life as a composer.

Price’s music brings together the European classical tradition in which she was trained and the haunting melodies of African American spirituals and folk tunes. Other musical influences include African American church music and European Romantic composers like Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. During the course of her life, Florence Price wrote symphonies, concertos, instrumental chamber music, music for voice and piano, works for piano, works for organ, and arrangements of spirituals.

Her best known vocal work, the setting of the Negro Spiritual, “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord,” for medium voice and piano, was published by Gamble Hinged Music in 1937. Famed contralto Marian Anderson recorded the song for Victor that same year and regularly performed the song in concert. In 1949, Price published two of her spiritual arrangements, “I Am Bound for the Kingdom,” and “I’m Workin’ on My Buildin'”, and dedicated them to Anderson, who performed them on a regular basis.

When Price died in 1953, many of her concert pieces remained in manuscript and unpublished. Following her death, much of her work was overshadowed as new musical styles emerged that fit the changing tastes of modern society. Some of her work was lost, but as more African-American and female composers have gained attention for their works, so has Price. Many of her manuscripts and papers can now be found at the library of the University of Arkansas. Some items in this collection have been digitized and can be seen here: https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/p17212coll3.

In 2009, a substantial cache of Price’s works were found in a dilapidated house in Saint Anne, Illinois. The collection contained dozens of Price’s scores that had been thought to be lost. Here’s a 2018 piece from The New Yorker about the find: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-rediscovery-of-florence-price.

If you’d like to learn more about Florence Price, here are some items from the Music Library’s collection:

* The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence Price (DVD)

* Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 (Score)

* Sonata in E Minor for Piano (Score)

* Black Diamonds: Althea Waites plays music by Afro-American Composers (CD)

* Got the Saint Louis blues classical music in the jazz age / VocalEssence (Streaming audio)

Here is a recent piece about Price from NPR Music: