The composer Florence B. Price, whose catalog has been acquired by the music publisher G. Schirmer.
(Credit University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections)
Sergio A. Mims writes:
In a major
announcement the international music publisher G. Schirmer has announced
that it has acquired the worldwide publishing rights to all of Florence
Price's music.
Michael Cooper
November 15, 2018
A Rediscovered African-American Female Composer Gets a Publisher
In 1933, the
composer Florence Price became the first African-American woman to have a
symphony performed by a major American orchestra. But her work faded
from concert halls over the years.
Her music has been rediscovered recently,
particularly after a trove her manuscripts was discovered in 2009, in
her former summer home outside Chicago. And, on Thursday, the music
publisher G. Schirmer announced that it had acquired the worldwide
rights to her catalog.
“It’s my hope
that Florence Price’s contribution to the canon of American music will
finally be recognized and properly assessed,” Robert Thompson, the
president of G. Schirmer, wrote in an email. “She has been neglected for
too long.”
Price, who was born in
1887 to a middle-class family in Little Rock, Ark., became a prominent
member of the African-American intelligentsia, corresponding with W.E.B.
Dubois and setting poems by Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar to
music.
But she faced
many obstacles getting her music played in a more sexist, segregated
era, which she addressed in a 1943 letter that she wrote to Serge
Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
asking him to consider performing her music.
“Unfortunately
the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light,
froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility,” she wrote. “Add to that
the incident of race — I have Colored blood in my veins — and you will
understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a
position.”
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