“In 2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. The structure was in poor condition: 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 made a curious discovery: piles of musical manuscripts, books, personal papers, and other documents. The name that kept appearing in the materials was that of Florence Price. The Gatwoods looked her up on the Internet, and found that she was a moderately well-known composer, based in Chicago, who had died in 1953. The dilapidated house had once been her summer home.”
This is how Alex Ross opened his 2018 “New Yorker” article “The Rediscovery of Florence Price”.
Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in a mixed-race family. Her father, Dr. James H. Smith was Little Rock’s well-respected first African-American dentist, as well as a published author, active politically on the state and local levels. Her mother, Florence Irene Gulliver Smith was an elementary school teacher and later a successful businesswoman, restaurant and real estate owner. Florence Beatrice received her first musical training from her mother, and presented her first public recital at the age of four. By the time Price was eleven she had sold her first composition to a publisher. At the age of fifteen, she was enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music, one of the few conservatories that admitted African-Americans at the time. She trained to become a professional composer, performer, pianist, church organist, and choral director.
In 1927, during the Great Migration from the Deep South, she moved with her husband and children to Chicago, where her music career began to expand. She studied with well-respected musicians in town and worked as a Presbyterian church organist, concert pianist, studio teacher, and composer. She was an active member of the Chicago Club of Women Organists, and was inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. The Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor in 1933, making Price the first African-American female composer to be performed by a major orchestra.
She received numerous accolades during her career: she won composition competitions, performances of her works earned good press reviews, and her educational pieces, published by major companies including Schirmer, Presser, McKinley, Carl Fischer, were in demand. While maintaining a career primarily as a teacher and composer, Price also played numerous piano and organ concerts, including much of her own music. In Chicago’s African-American community she was sought after as a lecturer and as a theatre organist, improvising for “silent movies”. Price composed over 300 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voice, piano and organ, and she arranged instrumental and vocal versions of Spirituals. Her music reflects both European classical tradition and her Southern heritage.
Unfortunately, after her sudden death her music was quickly forgotten. The reason why Price’s music fell into oblivion and neglect is simple. In a letter to the Boston’s Symphony Orchestra famous conductor she expressed it best: “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.” She did not receive a response to her letter. However, Chicago Symphony director Frederick Stock, as well as friendships with influential personalities of the time, like Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, Margaret Bonds, helped her works to get performed and gain some recognition during her lifetime. Much of her work was thought to be lost until the 2009 discovery in the abandoned house.
Until the last decade her music has not been widely performed nor recorded. More artists and orchestras are interested in her works currently. The first International Florence Price Festival in Washington, DC will take place in the summer of 2021.
I have presented organ works by Florence Price in celebration of the African-American Heritage Month last February, and recently as a postlude for the June 7th Sunday service. I am planning to include her four-movement Suite No. 1 For Organ (1942) in my upcoming CD recording of our fabulous Richards, Fowkes op. 14 organ in the sanctuary.
