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“My dear Dr. Koussevitzky: To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”
-Florence Price to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, 1943
By no means will every column this February have a connection to Black History Month, but I want to get this one out there right away so I don’t forget it. While listening to a public radio station recently, I heard the performance of a composition by Florence Price. If there has been one cultural field dominated by white men, it was classical music. Yet here was a work by an African-American woman. What's even more remarkable is that we know of her works at all.
According to an account published in The New Yorker three years ago, in 2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. Vandals had ransacked it and a fallen tree had torn a hole in the roof. In a part of the house that had remained dry, the Gatwoods discovered piles of musical manuscripts, books, personal papers, and other documents. The name that kept appearing in the materials was that of Florence Price. Research informed them that the dilapidated house had once been her summer home.
When the couple contacted librarians at the University of Arkansas, which already had some of Price’s papers, archivists responded and realized that the collection contained dozens of Price scores that had been thought lost, including the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. It was also determined that Price had composed a total of five symphonies.
Who was Florence Price and why did this discovery cause such excitement in classical music circles? She was born as Florence Beatrice Smith on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Despite racial issues of the era, her family was respected and did well within their community. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. She had her first piano performance at the age of four and had her first composition published at the age of 11. By the time she was 14, she had graduated as valedictorian of her class. After high school, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with a major in piano and organ. Initially, she passed as Mexican to avoid racial discrimination against African Americans, listing her hometown as Pueblo, Mexico. At the Conservatory, she studied composition and counterpoint with composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Also while there, she wrote her first string trio and symphony. She was just 19 when she graduated in 1906 with honors, and with both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.
Florence returned to Arkansas, where she taught briefly before moving to Atlanta. There, in 1910, she became the head of the music department of what is now Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college. Two years later she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer, and moved back to Little Rock where he had his practice. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching of a black man, the Price family decided to leave. Like many black families living in the Deep South, they moved north and settled in Chicago.
There Florence studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city and published four pieces for piano in 1928. She was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music. Financial struggles and abuse by her husband resulted in Price getting a divorce in 1931. She became a single mother to her two daughters and son. To make ends meet, she worked as an organist for silent film screenings and composed songs for radio ads under a pen name. She eventually moved in with a former student, Margaret Bonds, also a black pianist and composer. This friendship connected Price with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson who helped to further Price’s career.
Together, Price and Bonds began to achieve national recognition for their works. In 1932, they each submitted compositions for the Wanamaker Foundation Awards. Price won first prize with her Symphony in E minor and third for her Piano Sonata, earning her a $500 prize. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the symphony on June 15, 1933, making Price’s piece the first composition by an African-American woman to be played by a major orchestra. A number of Price's other orchestral works were played by the WPA Symphony Orchestra of Detroit, Chicago Women’s Symphony, and Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago. She wrote other extended works for orchestra, chamber works, art songs, works for violin, organ anthems, piano pieces, spiritual arrangements, four more symphonies, three piano concertos, and another violin concerto. She was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1940.
While doing all this, Price raised her children . . . and found time to remarry. Her second husband was widower Pusey Dell Arnett, an insurance agent and former baseball player for the Chicago Unions. Alas, the marriage lasted only three years, until 1934, when they separated but never divorced. On June 3, 1953, Price died from a stroke in Chicago at age 66.
It was not until 56 years later that some of Price’s most important works were rediscovered. Thanks to the Gatwoods’ diligence on following up on what they found, interest in Price was reignited and now her compositions are being performed all over the world – one that continues to be dominated by white, male conductors and composers.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including, most recently, “Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride From Hell.” The next collaboration with Bob Drury, “Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier,” will be published in April by St. Martin’s Press. There is a pre-order promotion underway which includes a specially made bookmark. Please click here for more information.