Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
(Courtesy photo)
North Andover, Massachusetts
By Terry Date
Apr 29, 2019
The true story has all the makings of a gripping tale.
An
abandoned summer home in the woods. A trove of music discovered amid the
debris. And, looming behind the mystery, a heroine — African American
composer Florence Price.
And now, with her music getting renewed attention — long after her death in 1953 — it signals a measure of redemption.
Hear
her story on Wednesday, May 1, told by the Andover Choral Society’s
David Fitch, three days before the group’s spring concert celebrating
Price’s music.
In his talk at Christ Church in Andover, Fitch
will tell how Price was under-appreciated in life, and largely forgotten
in death.
All who attend the talk are invited to stay and hear
the choral members rehearse for their upcoming spring concert, featuring
the choral composition “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” to be
performed three days later at North Andover High School Auditorium.
Price
sets her “Lincoln Walks” choral composition to a Vachel Lindsay poem.
Written in 1914, the year World War I started, the poem imagines a
troubled and pacing Lincoln lamenting bloodshed and war.
The Price composition was found among the manuscripts in her abandoned house south of Chicago.
The Andover Choral Society will sing from a new arrangement for piano by the group’s conductor, Michael Driscoll.
Price was born in 1887, grew up in Arkansas, and received classical
training and dual degrees at the New England Conservatory in Boston. She
returned to Arkansas, but after lynchings and other racial violence
escalated in the 1920s, she and her husband moved to Chicago.
