Celebrating Florence Price

I discovered the music of Florence Price about 20 years ago, in an anthology on a library shelf. I was looking for the hidden figures that I suspected must be hiding in plain sight. I was looking for American mavericks, for composers of color, for female composers. I guess I was looking for myself. When I found Price’s music, it felt like coming home.

Born April 9, 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price grew up in a world sharply defined and divided by race and gender. Music offered her a way to cross those borders - she studied piano and composition at the New England Conservatory, mastering European classical traditions while also holding fast to her own lineage: the sounds of spirituals, church hymns, and the rhythmic vitality of Black American life - a dual inheritance that became the cornerstone of her artistic identity.

Price made history in 1933 when her Symphony in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the World’s Fair, making her the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. But even after that groundbreaking moment, she navigated systemic barriers that limited her access to performances, publications, and recognition. She opened a 1943 letter to conductor Serge Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony Orchestra with these words: "To begin with, I have two handicaps – those of sex and race.”

The story of underrepresented voices is always one of “firsts” and “onlys”, but Price’s is more than that. She was a fiercely creative, determined woman who overcame the obvious obstacles of her time and place as well as personal challenges, leaving an abusive marriage to raise two children on her own. She made her own way and she made her own luck; she was a trailblazer and a force of nature. 

Price’s music speaks to the vast potential and power of human expression, her work a luminous tapestry woven of many influences. She was a product of early 20th-century transformation, answering Antonín Dvořák’s call for an American national style with an unmistakably personal inflection that embraces the pentatonic contours and call-and-response patterns of spirituals, the dance rhythms of juba, and the lyricism of Romantic orchestration. The result is a gorgeous hybrid, blooming from its blended roots.  

She wrote and wrote: four symphonies, three concertos, chamber music, songs and solo piano music… the extent of her output is vast and varied. And most of that music was  unknown, forgotten since her death in 1953, until the discovery of hundreds of manuscripts in an abandoned house in St. Anne, IL in 2009. A miracle of recovery and revival.

I first recorded Price’s music in 2016, when I included her Fantasie Negre #1 on my album America Again. Later that year, a dinner conversation with the musicologist John Michael Cooper turned into a journey of discovery. Michael was inspired to visit the Price archives at the University of Arkansas and dig through boxes of manuscripts. He found a trove of wonderful piano pieces and edited them, and I released them in a series of world-premiere recordings -  an important part of the renaissance that has brought her music back to our ears and hearts after being forgotten for decades. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my relationship with Price’s music has changed my life. Last year, when I played her Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin in three exhilarating, sold-out concerts in Marian Anderson Hall, I felt intense gratitude to the universe for having brought me on this uniquely joyful musical journey.

In the end, Florence Price’s contribution is not only the music she wrote, but the space she carved out for future generations of musicians whose creativity has the capacity to break through barriers, to open ears and minds, to change lives and change the world.