A New Legacy for Composer Florence Price
by Douglas Shadle
“She draws from all these musical languages — the Romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Brahms, the spirituals and the Juba dance. She’s inspired by the different styles but then how she expands upon them, makes them her own, and then weaves them together into a cohesive piece is extraordinary.” That’s what Michelle Cann, the Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, says she enjoys the most about Florence Price’s Piano Concerto. With such an enthusiastic endorsement, it’s easy to understand why Price’s music is experiencing a global renaissance. But classical music, even the best music, never speaks for itself. To be heard, it requires dedicated champions — and lots of them.
Florence B. Price (1887–1953), a Little Rock, Arkansas native, was the first African American woman to gain international acclaim for her compositions. After earning two diplomas at the New England Conservatory in 1906, she returned home to Arkansas to start a career as a piano teacher. (For a brief period, she was also the head of music at Clark University in Atlanta.) Escalating racial violence eventually led the Price family — Florence, her husband Thomas (whom she eventually divorced), and her two young daughters—to leave Little Rock for Chicago in 1927, and she remained there until her death in 1953. The vibrant cultural richness of the Bronzeville district proved to be a constant source of musical inspiration and artistic sustenance.
Just before moving to Chicago, Price turned from writing short teaching pieces for her students and began exploring compositions in larger forms. She entered several of these pieces into competitions designed to support Black composers and won a string of prizes, bringing her talent into broad public view. She ultimately created a catalog numbering nearly 300 works in all. In turn, a vast array of performers programmed her music during her lifetime, from the world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to local women’s music clubs and aspiring young pianists across the country. Although a handful of pieces remained accessible to new generations of musicians, most of her compositions were not published during her lifetime, leaving her daughters to advocate on her behalf in an industry marked by deep prejudices against women and musicians of color.
Beginning in the 1970s, when Price’s older daughter’s health had begun to decline, a number of invested scholars and performers—Barbara Garvey Jackson, Helen Walker- Hill, Mildred Denby Green, Althea Waites, Rae Linda Brown, Karen Walwyn, Linda Holzer, Louise Toppin, Trevor Weston, and others—worked for several decades to restore Price’s legacy by creating an impressive body of scores, recordings and scholarly publications. One of the crowning achievements of this enormous effort is Dr. Brown’s vivid biography of Price, The Heart of a Woman, published posthumously in 2020 by the University of Illinois Press. But these dedicated advocates continually faced an unusual hurdle to widespread public appreciation: most of Price’s music was missing.
Then lightning struck. In 2009, an Illinois couple stumbled on a treasure trove of Price’s handwritten scores—dozens upon dozens of them—in a dilapidated house near the town of St. Anne, once a summer getaway for middle-class African American Chicagoans. A few photos found in the house show Price and her daughters once enjoying the garden outside. The University of Arkansas, where Barbara Garvey Jackson served on the music history faculty, purchased these materials and made them available for public use in 2015, enabling musicians to encounter Price’s full catalog for the first time.
Intrepid performers, such as violinist Er-Gene Kahng and the Houston-based Apollo Chamber Players, found musical rewards among the new materials and made world-premiere recordings of Price’s two violin concertos and a string quartet. Meanwhile, the Arkansas-based composer and filmmaker James Greeson used the newly discovered materials as the basis of a stunning documentary, and musicologists Samantha Ege and Marquese Carter (both of whom are accomplished performers themselves) began building on Rae Linda Brown’s scholarly foundation with new critical insights into Price’s life, work, and style. Cann herself became one of the many musicians who took an immediate interest, choosing to perform the Piano Concerto with New York-based activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished in 2016.
Described only briefly here, this collective grassroots effort attracted the attention of major media outlets and eventually prompted G. Schirmer, one of the world’s largest publishing firms, to acquire the rights to Price’s catalog late in 2018. The firm’s staff set about creating fresh performing editions from the new manuscript collection so that organizations could finally bring Price’s music to their audiences more easily. With international distribution in place, Price’s moment finally seemed to have arrived only for the pandemic to shutter the classical music industry altogether, cutting off many scheduled performances of her music. But, Cann said, George Floyd’s murder “placed a new lens on everything in America,” including classical music, that demanded a drastic reorientation toward racial justice. Leading organizations heeded the call by featuring Price and other composers of color on their digital streams, reaching countless listeners around the world who never would have heard this music otherwise.
And a new chain reaction fired. “What’s different now is the numbers,” Cann said. “Pianists are starting to learn this concerto and play it everywhere.” Her implication is that each soloist or conductor can move beyond simply introducing a work to audiences; they can embrace its expressive potential more fully and demonstrate that the music can be enjoyed in new ways time and again. Rae Linda Brown, whose extensive notes on Price are now available for further research at Emory University, believed this type of social moment would mark a new beginning: “It is for the next generation of music scholars to delve through the music, to study it, to perform it, to record it, and to tell the rest of the story.” Cann sees this story unfolding in her students. “I’ve been inspired by learning the music and then sharing it,” she said, “and in a way you’re teaching on stage. People have the access and the interest, and younger students will continue to promote. The future is bright if it keeps going this way.” Indeed, perhaps we all have something to learn from Florence Price.
Michelle Cann performs Florence Price with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra March 3 & 5, 2022, at 8:00pm in Symphony Hall. Click here for tickets and info.
Douglas Shadle is an Associate Professor of Musicology and Area Coordinator of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. An award-winning historian of American orchestral music, he is currently co-authoring, with Dr. Samantha Ege (University of Oxford), a biography of Florence Price for Oxford University Press’ Master Musicians Series.
