Florence Price (1887-1953)
(University of Arkansas Libraries)
Andrew Farach-Colton
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Thanks to a number of artists championing her work, the pioneering African American composer Florence Price is finally achieving the recognition she deserves, writes Andrew Farach-Colton
Until recently, Florence Price was remembered primarily, if at all, as a historical footnote for being the first woman composer of African descent to have her symphony played by a major American orchestra. That was in 1933, when Frederick Stock conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of her First Symphony – although, it should be added, not as part of the orchestra’s regular season but at a special concert entitled ‘The Negro in Music’, presented as part of the Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the Century of Progress Exposition). In a very real sense, then, Price is a symbolic figure, and the symbolism has deep significance, not least as her story is yet another crucial reminder of black women’s struggle to have their voices heard.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, Florence Beatrice Smith’s father was a successful dentist who later in life wrote a novel, her mother was a fine singer and pianist – a prominent family in the city’s black community. Florence’s musical gifts were apparent from an early age, and she was sent to the New England Conservatory where she was a star student in organ and piano pedagogy, as well as in the private composition lessons she took with George Chadwick, the school’s director. After graduation, she returned to teach in Little Rock, and in 1912 she married Thomas J Price, an up-and-coming lawyer. Increasingly violent racism and the enactment of Jim Crow laws eventually forced the couple and their young children to join ‘the Great Migration’ of blacks fleeing the South, and they eventually settled in Chicago where, with her exceptional abilities as a composer, pianist and choral conductor, Florence became an integral part of Chicago’s Black Renaissance creative movement.
The risk of becoming a symbol, however, is that it can all too easily lead to a pat, superficial assessment, and Price deserves far better than that. This is particularly pertinent at the moment, when it seems the entire classical music industry is rushing to respond to the ‘Me Too’ and ‘Black Lives Matters’ movements. The sudden groundswell of interest in her work is most welcome for being long overdue, but it’s imperative that we delve more deeply to discover not just who she was but what she represented.
Perhaps the appropriate place to start is with her footnoted Symphony No 1 in E minor. It was written, along with a Piano Sonata (also in E minor), as an entry to the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Contest, a competition for black composers, and both works were awarded first prize in their categories (and a total of $750 – more than $15,000 in today’s currency). In her magisterial biography, The Heart of a Woman, the late Price scholar Rae Linda Brown writes that it was Price winning the Wanamaker Award that induced Frederick Stock to take a look at her First Symphony and decide to programme it for the Century of Progress Exposition, where he served as musical advisor.
New research suggests a different story, however, as Dr Samantha Ege
of Lincoln College, University of Oxford, tells me. ‘There’s this idea
that this all-white, all-male orchestra just sort of magically took an
interest in Price’s music, but actually it was Maude Roberts George
working behind the scenes, supporting Price in getting the score
finished and making sure the world could hear it. That’s the story that
needs to be told.’ Price and George were part of a robust network of
black women, Ege explains. ‘These were middle- to upper-class black
Americans coming from a very educated background. A lot of them had
conservatory training, and the husbands of these women tended to be
lawyers or judges or owned printing presses, and so these women were
able to have their activities supported.’ George, who herself trained as
a singer, was also an influential music critic for The Chicago Defender,
a nationally distributed African American newspaper, and proved to be
an extremely effective arts administrator. ‘George was amazing at
networking, at bringing people together, and she was a real force in
this musical community from the late 1920s through the 1930s.’ In fact,
Ege says, the Chicago Symphony premiere came about because George
personally underwrote the cost of the performance.
‘Price is very comfortable drawing from musical soundscapes from outside the orchestral realm’ – Professor Doug Shadle
There are revelations when it comes to the score itself, too. A cursory hearing, for example, might suggest Dvořák’s New World Symphony as Price’s primary model, just as the Czech composer’s work had been the model for her teacher Chadwick. ‘It’s very easy to credit Dvořák, and draw this direct line between him and the black composers of the 1930s,’ Ege says, ‘but if we consider their musical education, cultural environment and the various influences they would have been drawing upon, it’s not so direct a trajectory.’
The professor Douglas Shadle believes that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a powerful influence. Shadle – a Little Rock native who now teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and is collaborating with Ege on a new biography of Price for Oxford University Press’s Master Musicians Series – says, ‘Coleridge-Taylor visited the United States from Britain a couple of times around 1910 and really created a stir. His music was in the classical tradition, and both folksy and not folksy. His impact really shook the black intelligentsia of the time.’
Ege concurs, adding that black composers like Florence Price and her contemporaries would have also been aware of groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers who toured the country beginning in the late 19th century and made the negro spiritual a concert art form. ‘This is something Dvořák had nothing to do with, and that’s so important for understanding Price’s compositional voice. It was such a transformative moment when this plantation music, music that was so denigrated because of its origins, asserted itself in the concert hall. And so that’s also a history she’s drawing upon.’
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