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Women's History Month - Featuring Composers [1]
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Date: 2023-03-01
Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
March is Women’s History Month. We rarely give thought to women composers, though their gifts to classical and orchestral music are substantial. They have always been with us. There are some whose names have been lost to obscurity through the ages. Others are better known, especially those who were fortunate enough to have been born in more enlightened times.
Since we’re right on the heels of Black History Month, here’s a work for your consideration by
Florence Beatrice Price (1887 – 1953). You may have never heard of her. She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was taught music by her mother from a young age after she was denied music education from the city. She then attended New England Conservatory in 1903 to study piano, organ, and composition, and returned to Arkansas with a teaching certificate to bring music education back to her hometown. However, after a series of violent, racially-charged events occurred in Little Rock, Price relocated to Chicago in 1927, where her music career took off. She went on to have a prolific career, writing dozens of orchestral, vocal, instrumental, and chamber works, with a musical style influenced by composers such as Dvořák and Coleridge-Taylor as well as Negro spirituals and vernacular dances.
In 1932, she won a Rodman Wanamaker Music Award for her Symphony No. 1 in E minor. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the work, which marked the first time a major American orchestra had performed a piece written by an African-American woman. Her genius was widely recognized by black classical music societies but she often encounted obstacles in larger society where either her race or her gender impeded her success, and requests for performance opportunities were turned down or went ignored altogether.
A vast collection of previously unpublished works was recently found in an abandoned house outside of St. Anne’s, Illinois which Price used as a summer home. The pieces have painstakingly been catalogued and are now being performed and recorded, finally receiving the attention they and she deserve.
It is my favorite symphony. Period.
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