NewsWise.com: New Recording Features First Major Female African-American Composer [Florence B. Price]

Florence B. Price

(University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections)

Florence B. Price is featured at AfriClassical.com

NewsWise

Recently discovered work of Arkansas native Florence Price has been recorded for the first time by U of A music professor Er-Gene Kahng.

January 18, 2018

A recently discovered violin concerto by Florence Price, an African-American composer and Arkansas native, is available on CD for the first time. Albany Records will release the recording, by Er-Gene Kahng, Feb. 1. Kahng is a violin professor and director of graduate advising in the Music Department of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Kahng will perform Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchesta Saturday, Feb. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Arend Arts Center in Bentonville. This performance will be the world premiere of the piece.

Florence B. Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock and studied at the New England Conservatory, the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory. She wrote music throughout her life, producing as many as 300 compositions. Price’s groundbreaking Symphony in E Minor was the first work by a black woman to be performed by a major symphony orchestra in the United States, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1933.

Price lived in a time and place where women, and especially black women, were treated as second-class citizens. She never attained full recognition during her lifetime and, as Kahng said, has been nearly forgotten to history. Yet her enormous compositional output shows that she never stopped writing and producing. Kahng said she hopes that this project will raise awareness about “a remarkable woman who led a life of quiet tenacity and resistance.”