Florence Price

Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher, as well as a Broadway performer whose credits include the 1927 musical Hit the Deck. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Florence (Gulliver) and James H. Smith, she was one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her father was the only African-American dentist in Little Rock, and her mother, a music teacher, oversaw her earliest musical training. Price gave her first piano performance at age four and had a composition published at age eleven.

She graduated as valedictorian of her school class in 1901 at age fourteen, having attended a Catholic convent school. In 1903, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with a double major in piano pedagogy and organ performance. To avoid racial discrimination, she initially listed her hometown as Pueblo, Mexico, and passed as Mexican. At the Conservatory she studied composition and counterpoint with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, and completed her first string trio and symphony while enrolled there. She graduated in 1906 with honors, earning both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.

Following graduation, Price returned to Arkansas in 1910 and taught briefly before relocating to Atlanta, Georgia, where she became head of the music department at what is now Clark Atlanta University. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer with a practice in Little Rock, and returned to Arkansas, where the couple had two daughters. A series of racial incidents in Little Rock, including a lynching in 1927, prompted the family to leave. They joined the Great Migration northward and settled in Chicago, where Price remained active until her death in 1953.

In Chicago, Price entered a productive period of composition and study. She enrolled at various institutions, including the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher's College, the University of Chicago, and the American Conservatory of Music, studying music alongside languages and liberal arts. Her composition teachers in the city included Arthur Olaf Andersen, Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette, and Leo Sowerby. She published four piano pieces in 1928 and became part of the Chicago Black Renaissance. In 1930, pianist and composer Margaret Bonds premiered Price's Fantasie nègre No. 1 at the twelfth annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians, where it received notable praise from critic Carl Ditton writing for the Associated Negro Press.

Financial hardship and an abusive marriage led Price to divorce Thomas Price in 1931, at age forty-four, leaving her a single mother to her two daughters. To support herself, she worked as an organist for silent film screenings and composed radio advertising music under a pen name. During this period she lived with friends, eventually moving in with Margaret Bonds. Through Bonds, Price developed connections with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom contributed to her growing recognition as a composer.

In 1932, Price submitted compositions to the Wanamaker Foundation Awards and won first prize with her Symphony in E minor, as well as third place for her Piano Sonata, receiving a five-hundred-dollar prize. The following year, arts advocate Maude Roberts George, president of the Chicago Music Association, paid two hundred fifty dollars to have Price's First Symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductor Frederick Stock as part of a program titled "The Negro in Music" at the Century of Progress World's Fair. This made Price the first African-American woman to have a composition performed by a major American orchestra.

In 1934, Price performed her Concerto in D minor for Piano and Orchestra at the Chicago Musical College commencement program, and subsequently performed the work at the National Association of Negro Musicians in Pittsburgh, where it received critical praise from the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph. The Telegraph specifically noted Price's integration of African-American cultural elements into the work. The Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago, which championed women composers and performers, performed the Concerto on October 12, 1934, beginning a long association with Price. The Concerto in D minor was later performed by the Chicago Symphony and the Michigan Works Progress Administration Orchestra, among others. During the 1930s, additional orchestral works by Price were performed by the Works Progress Administration Symphony Orchestra of Detroit.

In 1940, Price was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, a process that had begun six years earlier when she contacted composer John Alden Carpenter about membership requirements. In 1949, she published two spiritual arrangements, "I Am Bound for the Kingdom" and "I'm Workin' on My Buildin'," dedicating both to Marian Anderson, who performed them regularly. Over the course of her career, Price composed more than three hundred works, including four symphonies, four concertos, choral works, art songs, chamber music, and music for solo instruments. She is recognized as the first African-American woman to be acknowledged as a symphonic composer and the first to have a composition performed by a major orchestra. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was discovered in her abandoned summer home.