Recently I conducted Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with soloist Jennifer Hayghe and Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra. Our rehearsal was covered by 9NEWS Denver and the performance was extremely well received. It’s a wonderful, American piece and I highly recommend it to anyone to enjoy or program.
In preparing for the concert, I read a wonderful biography, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown. The book is not only the story of an amazing woman, it also tells a story about America for African Americans at that time, and how Florence Price managed to navigate this society. Here are bits from our program notes.
Florence B. Price (1887-1953) was a Twentieth Century African American composer whose music was well-respected in her lifetime, however, her work was temporarily excluded from our collective cultural consciousness in the US until recently. Although the concerto had been performed, the full score and orchestral parts for her Piano Concerto in One Movement only appeared in 2019 at an auction! Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra is in the first wave of orchestras performing the work as she conceived it. My score was printed on September 12, 2022, and I received it around September 15th [for a performance on November 19, 2023]!
Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a family of professionals. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a businesswoman, singer, and pianist. At the time of her birth, Little Rock was known as a “Negro Paradise” as it had a thriving African American professional class, including educators. Price studied at New England Conservatory in Boston, double majoring in Organ performance and piano pedagogy, while also studying composition with NEC’s director, composer George Chadwick. Upon returning to Little Rock, Price got married and taught music, but by 1927, the oppressive Jim Crow laws prompted her to join the “Great Migration.” She landed in Chicago where she was part of the Chicago Renaissance (which was connected to the Harlem Renaissance) and was very active as a performer and teacher. She joined two women’s music clubs (which were racially mixed), conducted a church choir, played recitals, and taught lessons.
Price’s piano concerto premiered on October 12, 1934, at the Century of Progress Exhibition going on in Chicago. The performers included the pianist Margaret Bonds (a terrific African American composer as well as pianist), and the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago, with their music director, Ebba Sundstrom, conducting. The program included works by two other women composers, Amy Beach, and Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Her work garnered an excellent review in the Chicago Herald and Examiner:
“FLORENCE PRICE’S CONCERTO BRILLIANT… A nationalist in my attitude toward the art, it is pleasant for me to record the brilliant success of Florence Price’s piano concerto as presented by Margaret Bonds and the orchestra. This work was first heard in one of the Chicago Symphony concerts in the Auditorium theater during the first year of the fair and, as duly reported on that occasion, it represents the most successful effort to date to lift native folk-song idiom of the Negro to artistic levels.
It is full of fine melodies deriving from this source directly by imitation. The quasi-symphonic treatment of these ideas shows abundant resource, both harmonic and orchestral. Finally the piano part is expertly set upon the keyboard and was brilliantly play by Margaret Bonds.”
(as quoted by Rae Linda Brown in “The Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago and Florence B. Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement,” American Music, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 185-205).
The reviewer is in error about the work played by the Chicago Symphony in the previous year at the fair; that performance featured Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, not the piano concerto. The performance by the Chicago Symphony and their music director, Frederick Stock, made Florence Price the first African American woman composer to have her work performed by a major American orchestra. Sadly, this was her only major orchestra performance, though she did get performances with the women’s symphonies in Chicago and Detroit. Interest in her music rekindled in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement and Price, posthumously, found a champion in the Philadelphia Orchestra and their music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who recorded her Symphonies No. 1 and 3, winning a Grammy for the recording in 2022.
During a time when white American composers struggled to compose true “American music,” Price and her African American contemporaries, such as William Grant Still and William Dawson, composed decidedly authentic American music, drawing on their African American/African diaspora roots. This was a more authentic artistic path for American artists than copying European composers; this American musical language became influential in every generation of American composers since. We owe Price a debt of gratitude, but I wish that she had lived to see the resurgence of her terrific music.