Florence Price (1887-1953) was the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major American orchestra.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan, and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
All month we’re talking about Musicians, women whose musical talents shaped history and the music industry.
Today’s musician was an American classical composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher. She was the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major American orchestra. Though she wrote more than 300 musical compositions, her works didn’t receive the widespread attention that they deserved until after her death. Let’s talk about Florence Price.
Florence Price was born into a middle class family in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father was a dentist. Her mother was a music teacher who greatly influenced Florence’s early music education. By the age of four, Florence had her first piano performance. By eleven, Florence’s first composition was published. At just fourteen, Florence graduated as valedictorian from her high school and entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. A remarkable talent , she earned two degrees -- organ and piano -- in three years.
Florence’s early adulthood was dedicated to teaching and raising a family. She held teaching positions in Arkansas before moving to Atlanta where, in 1910, she became the head of the music department of what is now Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college.
In 1912, she married lawyer Thomas J. Price and the couple moved back to Little Rock. Despite her qualifications, Florence was denied membership to the State Music Teachers Association. Not giving up, she created her own music studio, teaching piano and music theory to her students. But after a series of incidents perpetrated against the Black community, including the lynching of several African-American men in 1927, Florence and Thomas decided to move to Chicago out of fear for their safety.
In Chicago, Florence had the chance to study music composition with leading teachers of the day . In 1928, she published four pieces for piano. In 1931 she filed for a divorce from her husband, who had been abusive. That left Florence in the position of being a single mother with two daughters. To make ends meet, she performed as an organist for silent film screenings and composed songs for radio ads under the pen name “Vee Jay”.
Around that time, Florence was rooming with a friend and fellow Black pianist and composer, Margaret Bonds. Margaret connected Florence with poet Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, who we previously highlighted this month. Both would become great collaborators of Florence’s.
In 1932, Florence’s career really kicked off. She took home the winning prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Symphony in E minor. This work later premiered with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, thereby making history. Florence was the first Black woman composer to have her work performed by a major American orchestra. Florence wrote other orchestral piece, chamber works, art songs, and violin, piano, and spiritual arrangements. Her popular works included “Moon Bridge” and “Songs to a Dark Virgin”.
Florence’s musical style blended elements of Black cultural heritage with classical composition.
One of the major highlights of Florence’s life was also a renowned moment in the civil rights movement. In 1939, famed opera singer and friend Marian Anderson performed before a crowd of 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Her final song of the recital was Florence’s arrangement of “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord”. Alisha Lola Jones much later wrote forNPR that this moment captured the “sound of black sisterhood” as both women amplified each other's voices through the “politics of concert performance”.
In 1940, Florence was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. In 1949, she published two of her spiritual arrangements which included “I Am Bound for the Kingdom” and dedicated them to Marian Anderson.
Florence continued to perform and compose until she died of a stroke in Chicago on June 3, 1953. But her legacy lives on. Florence was successful despite being everything a composer was not supposed to be at that time. She succeeded as a Black woman in a white man’s field. In 1964, an elementary school was renamed in her honor.
In 2015, a documentary of her life called “The Caged Bird: The life and music of Florence B. Price” was released, and in recent years, recordings of her work have increased. This is in part due to a 2009 discovery of a large bundle of her music in a small cabin in St. Anne, Illinois. This included dozens of her scores, two violin concertos and her fourth symphony.
All month, we’re talking about musicians. For more on why we’re doing what we’re doing, check out our newsletter, Womannica Weekly. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @encyclopediawomannica and reach out directly on twitter @jennymkaplan.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!