Rediscovering the majesty of composer Florence Price

Crisis Forum

Price - the first nationally recognized Black woman composer wrote some 300 works, but is largely forgotten.

Even among classical music lovers, few know her name. Fewer still can remember her time as one of the most successful and noted composers of the last century's first decades. But when the mention of Florence Price does touch a nerve of, recognition, it is often because of her link to one of the most famous concerts in American music history.

The day was April 9, 1939. The great contralto Marian Anderson, singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a huge throng after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her use of its Constitution Hall, closed her program with "My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord." On an afternoon heavy with political and social portent (the program featured arias, patriotic anthems, hymns and spirituals), Price's simple song made for a fitting closure. Its stirring syncopation, dark and measured pulse, and final strain, ending in a triumphant flourish to the high octave, inspired waves of cheers from a crowd galvanized against the ills of discrimination under the banners of art and faith.

That was Florence Price's gift. The first American Black woman composer to achieve national recognition distinguished her compositions with humility and nobility, using her finely honed talent to communicate a unique synthesis of two cultures, African American and European.

Although Price wrote some 300 works of music - half of which were vocal arrangements, with spirituals prominent among them - she is largely forgotten, except among academicians and devotees of African American classical music. Her spiritual arrangements enjoyed mainstay status for a time in the repertories of such artists as Leontyne Price (no relation), Roland Hayes and Harry Burleigh, but her symphonic pieces, like those of composers William Dawson and William Grant Still, too often languish, unperformed and unrecorded.

Now a recent recording of three of Price's major orchestral works seeks to bring her from the footnotes of musical history to center stage. Florence Price (Koch International Classics) was released earlier this year by the Women's Philharmonic, the San Francisco-based organization devoted to rescuing forgotten music of women composers from oblivion.

"We had a difficult time even locating her works," says Apo Hsu, the artistic director and conductor of The Women's Philharmonic, who learned that the scores for "The Oak" (c. 1934) and "Mississippi River Suite" (c. 1934) were sitting on shelves in a library at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and in a private collection at Yale University, untouched for decades.

"We chose Florence Price because her music is wonderfully rich, she orchestrates really well and she's so well-versed in musical language," says Hsu. "As an arranger of spirituals and songs, she had such a great reputation and created a great wealth of work, but when it came to her orchestral pieces, they were not being performed."

That Price, born in 1887, the daughter of a Little Rock, Ark., dentist (believed to be the city's first Black one) and a piano teacher, would even consider trying to make a living as a classical music composer suggests an audacious courage belying the realities of her time and place. But Price was an unusual woman caught in unusual circumstances.

Florence Beatrice Smith came of age in Little Rock during the pre-Jim Crow era when Black businesses flourished and Black professionals formed a subculture of relative privilege in the small southern town.

"If you were Black and up and coming in the 1880s before Jim Crow laws, Little Rock was the place to be," says Rae Linda Brown, professor of music at the University of California at Irvine. Brown is a leading authority on Price and author of the forthcoming biography, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence Price (University of Illinois Press).

"Before Jim Crow laws, Little Rock was one of the most fascinating places in the South," says Brown, who stumbled upon Price's works while rummaging through Yale's tremendous collection of Afro-Americana as a graduate student.

"We have the image of it being country and backwoods, and very segregated," Brown says. "But there was a cadre of Black people who were very well educated, like Florence Price's parents, and who were not born in the South but came to Little Rock as professionals."

Price's father, James Smith, was born of free Black parents and lived in Delaware, Philadelphia and Chicago before moving to Little Rock, where he met a young piano teacher (also named Florence) from Indianapolis. He maintained a dental practice in Little Rock that even included a few white patients, while his wife ran a successful diner and taught piano. One of three children, the younger Florence studied piano with her mother, then went on to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She graduated in 1906 with a soloist's diploma in organ and a teacher's diploma in piano.

After teaching stints at Shorter College in Little Rock (1907-1910), and Clark University in Atlanta (19101912), she returned home and married Thomas Price, a Little Rock attorney. They moved to Chicago, but the marriage eventually failed, leaving Price with two small children to raise alone. "Her financial situation was at times very serious," says Brown, who notes that Price and her young family often had to live with friends.

Living the precarious life of a single Black mother in Chicago in the 1920s and '30s, Price made a modest living teaching piano, organ and composition (she was even forced to live with one of her students, composer/arranger Margaret Bonds). She also composed an impressive body of vocal works for all voices and cultivated a budding passion for symphonic music. Looking for ways to get her instrumental works performed and heard (copying music was prohibitively expensive), Price entered one composition competition after another. Eventually, she won the prize that awarded her not only a first rate performance of her work, but also an appreciable level of fame.

In the widely revered Wanamaker Competition in 1932, she won four prizes, including the top prize for a symphonic composition. (It was a banner year for Black women composers; Bonds, Price's students also competed and won a prize.) Frederick Stock, then conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, presented Price's "Symphony in E Minor" for the Chicago World's Fair (Century of Progress Exposition) in 1933. It was the first time a symphony written by a Black woman had been performed by a major symphony orchestra.

Critics raved unanimously. Although a second symphony is lost (it appears not to have been copyrighted) Price went on to write a third symphony, "Symphony No. 3 in C Minor" (1940), premiered by the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Valter Poole. Composed in the late summer of 1940 when Price was 52 years old, the piece reflects the romantic mood and textures associated with other writers of the time, including the popular Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, and projects the folk pathos of Black southern life. Price herself wrote notes about the piece, saying it "is intended to be Negroid in character and expression" and that it was an "attempt to picture a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought."

Founded in 1981, the 70-member Women's Philharmonic under Hsu offers a fresh and insightful reading of the "Third Symphony" - romantic, large in its scope and richly textured. "The Oak" is abstract in character, while the "Mississippi River Suite" is a homage to the spirituals and folk songs of the antebellum south.

"Her orchestrations are lush and immense - bigger than Tchaikovsky," says Hsu. "In the `Mississippi River Suite,' she has a wonderful way of using the orchestra to depict life along the river, using the influences of the juba dance rhythms and other sounds and colors to create a sense of tapping back to African roots."

The new recording rides the crest of a wave of new interest in women composers' music. "I think she would be very pleased to have her work brought back to life so generations to come can have an opportunity to hear it," Hsu says. "I think she would appreciate this effort to enhance her legacy."

Rosalyn story is a musician and freelance writer in Dallas.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001
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