Composer Florence Price is pictured circa 1942.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Megan Szostak
March 15, 2022
Racial bias and misogyny are endemic
in the practice and performance of classical music and have restricted
many great talents from making their way into the classical canon. Florence Price (1887–1953) was one such musician whose compositions were celebrated during her lifetime but have since fallen into regrettable obscurity.
Price was born to a mixed-race family in Little Rock, Ark. and showed an early aptitude for music. After graduating as valedictorian from her high school class, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass. At the institution, Price listed her hometown as “Pueblo, Mexico” in an effort to pass as Mexican to avoid abounding racial discrimination against Black Americans. Price graduated with honors in 1906 with a teaching certificate and an artist diploma in organ.
She returned to Little Rock after her schooling, but she moved around and eventually went north to Chicago after a series of incidents of racial violence took place in the South. In Chicago, Price struggled with financial instability but was able to further her compositional career through the support of friends and connections with other Black artists.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Frederick Stock, premiered Price’s monumental Symphony No. 1 in E minor in 1933 in a performance that was met with a rapturous critical reception. Eugene Stinson, a critic writing for the Chicago Daily News, wrote that Price’s symphony was a “faultless
work cast in something less than modernist mode and even reminiscent at
times of other composers who have dealt with America in tone.”
Price’s Symphony No. 1
remains a “faultless work” — a gentle amalgamation of Black American
thematicism and traditionally classical styles and instrumentations. The
symphony is a melodic masterpiece, constructed with precision and
poise, that challenges what a classical melody sounds like and where it
is sourced.
Those familiar with the classical canon will notice parallels between Price’s work and Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony No. 9 in E minor (1893). With his ninth symphony, Dvořák’s primary goal was to help establish grounds for an American school of composition. Both Price‘s first and Dvořák’s ninth are built around themes heard in Black American folk music of the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods, and they represent the American school of composition. Price draws heavily on Dvořák’s No. 9 in her first symphony in the instrumentation and tonality she employs along with her use of the pentatonic scale.
It is clear that Price’s Symphony No. 1 extends far beyond Dvořákian influence. In this symphony, the form is altered to include both a chorale and a juba dance, wherein complex elements of Black American folk music including call-and-responses, cross-rhythms and untraditionally classical percussion instruments
abound. Price’s command over her melodies makes for an exhilarating
auditory experience for even the most amateur listener, and the
genre-defying nature of the composition — which samples themes from
Black American folk music and elements of western European classical
music, spiritual music and blues — is unmatched by any other classical
composer.
