John Malveaux: KUSC.org: Out of the Silence: The Resurrection of Florence B. Price

Florence Price at the piano, 1941  

Photo: Arkansas Educational Television Network

John Malveaux of www.MusicUNTOLD.com writes about Classical KUSC Radio in Los Angeles:

Kathy Crandall (LA Opera League) shared the following with MusicUNTOLD:

KUSC's Open Ears is an online series about composers, musicians, and conductors who deserve more recognition. Read about the first African American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major orchestra, Marian Anderson's performance in front of Lincoln Memorial and the incredible, all-too-brief life of conductor Calvin Simmons.

Click here to read all of KUSC's Open Ears articles

KUSC

Posted by Gail Eichenthal · 2/12/2018 

About Open Ears: So many people who made invaluable contributions to classical music were underappreciated in their time, or have been nearly lost to history. That’s why KUSC is starting Open Ears, a series of stories about composers, musicians, and conductors who deserve more recognition. You can learn more and explore other articles here.

Florence B. Price, the first African American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major orchestra, is having a moment. I think there’s a good chance that moment will stretch into decades. Her music–largely unheard since her death in 1953–is constantly surprising: the sound world of Wagner and Dvorak infused with quirky changes of mood and pace, striking combinations of instruments and the unmistakable roots of her Southern heritage, the strains of gospel and Juba.

Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She attended the New England Conservatory, one of few prestigious music schools of the era to admit Black students. To escape the rampant racism of her native state, she moved to Chicago, where she intensified her musical studies and began to blossom as a composer of songs, piano pieces, and eventually four symphonies and other orchestral scores. In fact, it was conductor Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony that gave that historic performance of Price’s First Symphony in 1933. Though all this, she was also raising children and dealing with a messy divorce.