Florence Beatriz Price

Florence Beatrice Smith was born on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father, Dr. James H. Smith, was a dentist and one of only a dozen African American dentists in the United States at the time. He had relocated to Little Rock after his practice was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Her mother, Florence Gulliver, had been an elementary music teacher in the Indianapolis public school system. Despite the limited educational opportunities available to African Americans in the post-Civil War South, the Smith family had the financial means and societal access to provide the private instruction their youngest child needed to develop her prodigious musical talents.

Florence studied piano with her mother, giving her first recital at age four, and attended elementary school with another African American who would become a successful classical musician, William Grant Still. She continued her studies with Charlotte Andrews Stephens, an Oberlin Conservatory-trained musician. At age 14, Florence graduated from high school as class valedictorian and was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music. She studied music composition with the conservatory director, George Chadwick. It is believed that she sold her first composition at age 16, though the exact details are uncertain. She graduated with a diploma in piano as a teacher and in organ performance in 1906.

For four years, Florence taught at Little Rock’s Shorter College and offered private music lessons, then she joined the music faculty at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1912, she returned to Little Rock to marry a young lawyer, Thomas J. Price, who became a partner in the law firm of Scipio Africanus Jones. The law firm became embroiled in the 1919 “Elaine Race Riot Case,” successfully defending the lives of the African American men charged in the aftermath. During this period, Florence taught music privately and continued to compose while giving birth to three children – her eldest dying in infancy. She twice placed second for the Holstein Prize for composition.

Life for African Americans in Little Rock had grown steadily worse to the point where the Price family no longer felt safe residing in the town. They relocated to Chicago in 1927 and, now separated from her abusive husband, Florence Price began exploring educational opportunities in music and medicine, finally settling on music. She succeeded in finding publishers for her compositions, drawing much of her financial success from the publication of works for beginning pianists and writing music for radio commercials. She also taught music privately to young students, including Margaret Bonds, in the community.

In 1931, Price completed her Symphony in E Minor and received first place in the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Prize Competition for the work. Originally subtitled the “Negro Symphony,” this work integrated characteristic Afro-American folk idioms into classical structures. However, unlike William Grant Still and William Dawson, Price abandoned a title that would have suggested a programmatic work and, perhaps, would have limited the perception of the symphony’s scope. Since the subtitle was almost obliterated from the score she examined, it can be concluded that Price changed her mind prior to the work’s first performance; none of the reviews refer to its programmatic name.

Price’s symphony was selected to premiere during the Century of Progress Exposition at the Chicago World Fair. The June 15, 1933 concert marked the first time a major orchestra performed a symphonic work by an African American woman. The event was described by Robert S. Abbott in the June 22, 1933 edition of the Chicago Defender.

Author Lawrence Schenbeck noted that Price was not named in the article, despite Abbott’s reference to other musicians of the African diaspora, tenor Roland Hayes, pianist Margaret Bonds and composers Harry T. Burleigh and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Beginning in the 1930s, Price was very active in Chicago’s musical life. Her compositions were performed by the Chicago Symphony, and she performed her own Piano Concerto in One Movement as piano soloist with the Chicago Women’s Symphony under the baton of Ebba Sundstrom (Bonds would perform the work with the orchestra in 1934). Her body of instrumental music included works for orchestra, organ, and violin, with many of her compositions written for musical instruction within her own studio.

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. Anderson would also program Price’s “Songs to a Dark Virgin,” based on a poem by Langston Hughes, for her second American tour.

Anderson also played a significant role in introducing the song to the world during her historic Lincoln Memorial concert on April 9, 1939. An estimated 75,000 concert attendees and an international radio audience heard Ms. Anderson’s stirring performance of Price’s setting as part of a program that symbolized an acknowledgment of the talents of African American musicians in the world of Classical music. Writer Rosalyn Story explained the significance of the day and the song.

While Price experienced some professional success as a composer, she was never able to obtain the level of acknowledgment she sought. Author Michaela Baranello described one instance in November 1943 when the composer unsuccessfully solicited performance opportunities by corresponding with Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There is no evidence he ever replied to her.

Price was regularly compared with two contemporaries, William Grant Still and William Dawson. Although all three composers drew heavily from their African American heritage, Price's methods were actually quite close to Antonin Dvořák's in the way she approached the use of ethnic materials (both of the Old and the New Worlds), and she can certainly be aligned stylistically with Dawson.

Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, Price continued composing works for a wide variety of vocal and instrumental forces. She was planning a trip to Europe when she suffered a stroke. Florence Beatrice Price died on June 3, 1953.

While there were some limited efforts to commemorate Price’s life and musical accomplishments, knowledge of her role in 20th-century American music had–until recent years–become nearly non-existent.

Much of Price’s compositional output was considered to be lost until an estimated 200 manuscripts and other papers by the composer were discovered in her former summer house in St. Anne, a suburb of Chicago, in 2009. The discovery offered the musical world a new opportunity to discover Price’s music, perhaps now at a time when her output can be evaluated and appreciated in its own right.