Florence Price

Florence Beatrice Smith was born on 9 April 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the United States, into a middle-class African American family. Her father, Thomas Smith, was a respected dentist, and her mother, Florence Gulliver, a schoolteacher and businesswoman, was also a good pianist and singer who gave her her first lessons. In the American South racial segregation was then enforced by law, but the Smith family moved in cultured circles: the pianist John Blind Boone and the educator Booker T. Washington were guests in their home.

A precocious child, Florence gave her first piano recital at four and published her first composition at eleven. She finished high school at fourteen, top of her class. In 1903, aged sixteen, she entered the New England Conservatory in Boston, one of the few conservatories that admitted Black students. To avoid discrimination, her mother advised her to present herself as Mexican. There she studied organ, piano and composition, notably with George Whitefield Chadwick, who encouraged her to draw on African American music.

In 1906 she graduated in organ and piano teaching. She returned to the South to teach, first in Little Rock and then in Atlanta, where from 1910 to 1912 she headed the music department of Clark University, a university for Black students. In 1912 she married the lawyer Thomas J. Price and returned to Little Rock. They had three children, including a son who died in infancy. She taught piano but, because of the colour of her skin, was refused membership of the state music teachers’ association.

In the 1920s racist violence increased in Arkansas. In 1927, after the lynching of a Black man in Little Rock, the Price family fled to Chicago, like hundreds of thousands of African Americans in the “Great Migration” to the North. In Chicago Florence Price studied composition and orchestration further at several institutions, published piano pieces and earned her living accompanying silent films on the organ and writing radio jingles. She divorced in 1931 and raised her two daughters alone in difficult conditions.

In 1932 she won first prize in the prestigious Wanamaker competition for her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, as well as another prize for her Piano Sonata. On 15 June 1933 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock performed her symphony at the “Century of Progress” World’s Fair: the first time a major American orchestra had played a symphony by a Black woman. The third movement is a “Juba Dance”, inspired by a dance of enslaved African Americans, with clapping hands and stamping feet.

Her music combines the European symphonic tradition, inherited from Dvořák and her teachers, with spirituals and African American dances and rhythms. In 1934 she premiered her own one-movement Piano Concerto. She composed more than three hundred works: four symphonies, two violin concertos, chamber music, organ pieces and many songs and spiritual arrangements. The great contralto Marian Anderson sang her songs and often closed her recitals with her arrangement of My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.

In 1940 her Symphony No. 3 was successfully premiered in Detroit. But despite these successes Florence Price struggled to get her music performed because of prejudice against women and African Americans. She wrote to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky: “I have two handicaps — those of sex and race.” She died in Chicago on 3 June 1953, just as she was about to leave for Europe. Her music then fell into oblivion. In 2009 dozens of manuscripts, including her two violin concertos and her Fourth Symphony, were found in an abandoned house near Chicago, launching her rediscovery.