Florence Price's Symphony No. 1

In 2009, a couple bought an old house outside of Chicago. In the attic, they found boxes filled with yellowed sheets of music. Every piece was written by the same woman — Florence Price. “Who is Florence Price?” they wondered.*

This question, posed in these opening lines of a recent children’s book, is one the entire music world has been asking in recent years. The old, dilapidated house sits in St. Anne, a tiny community little more than an hour south of Chicago, in Kankakee County. This had been Florence Price’s summerhouse, long ago abandoned. The couple, the Gatwoods, were planning to renovate. Their discovery jump-started the renaissance of one of this country’s important musical figures, a Black woman composer with strong ties to Chicago and to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, whose music had long been overlooked, neglected and dismissed.

Their discovery jump-started the renaissance of one of this country’s important musical figures, a Black woman composer with strong ties to Chicago and to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, whose music had long been overlooked, neglected and dismissed.

Florence Price had moved to Chicago with her family in 1927, making the Great Migration followed by thousands of Black Americans fleeing the terrors of living in the South and hoping to find a land of opportunity in Chicago. When she grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, her father, Dr. James H. Smith, a prosperous dentist, was one of Little Rock’s most highly respected Black men. (The governor was rumored to be his secret patient.) But Florence already saw herself as part of a larger musical world. In 1903, she began studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, completing the four-year program in three years and graduating with diplomas in both piano and organ, the only student to receive two degrees that year.

After graduation, Florence set aside her musical ambitions; she returned to Little Rock to teach and lived at home with her parents. After her father died in 1910, Florence’s mother, who was of mixed race, sold all the family possessions, chose to pass for white, moved back to her hometown of Indianapolis, and vanished into the society of the majority. Florence moved from one teaching job to another, continued to give organ and piano recitals, married Thomas Jewell Price (the attorney who had helped settle Dr. Smith’s estate), started a family, and settled into a comfortable middle-class life in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Little Rock. Aside from the song she wrote after the birth of her first child, “To My Little Son,” she rarely found the time to compose anything.

But she did not give up. She spent the summers of 1926 and 1927 in Chicago, where she studied composition at Chicago Musical College, and no doubt realized that this was the place to build her career and live a better life, remote from the rising racial tension in Little Rock and the attacks and crimes and lynchings that had begun to spread throughout the city, sweeping into her family’s own neighborhood. Her arrival in Chicago placed her on the cusp of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Even in Chicago, composing music did not come easily. After the Depression, her husband was often without work; he grew angry and abusive. He moved out of the family house in March 1930. The next January, Price was granted a divorce and custody of their two daughters. By then she had begun to write music on a larger scale, reflecting a new certainty that composing was her calling.

In January 1931, Price began the score that would change her life — a symphony in E minor, her first big orchestral piece.

In January 1931, Price began the score that would change her life — a symphony in E minor, her first big orchestral piece. She worked on the score for much of the year (a broken foot gave her a bonus of uninterrupted time to compose). Sometimes, to make ends meet, she accompanied silent films on the organ in movie houses along “The Stroll,” a stretch of South State Street between Twenty-sixth and Thirty-ninth Streets, the heart of Chicago’s Black community. As she struggled to put her life back together and become the composer she wanted to be, in a world that viewed her through a prism of fierce prejudices, she cannot have dreamed that the most unlikely thing would happen: that Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony would give the world premiere of her symphony at the 1933 World’s Fair—the Century of Progress International Exposition.

In February 1932, Price entered four of her new works in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition, named for the department store owner and established five years earlier to support African American composers. Price’s symphony took the $500 first prize in the orchestral category (her tone poem, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, received honorable mention). That same year, Stock was named music advisor for the exposition, set in Chicago to honor the city’s centennial, and he began to look around for new scores that would represent the state of music in America. “Chicago talent first and American talent second,” he said. “European representation will be drastically limited.” Although Stock did not know Price, he picked her unpublished first symphony as the centerpiece of a concert to be given on June 15, 1933, in the Auditorium Theatre. (We have since learned that Maude Roberts George, president of the Chicago Music Association, and a critic for the Chicago Defender, raised the funds to underwrite the cost of the concert.) Despite the excitement and the applause that night, no one at the time entirely recognized the history-book significance of the occasion: this was the first performance of a large-scale composition by a Black woman composer given by one of the major U.S. orchestras.

“It is a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion,” the critic for the Chicago Daily News wrote, “. . . worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertory.”

“It is a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion,” the critic for the Chicago Daily News wrote, “. . . worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertory.” More telling was the reception in the Black press. “No one could have sat through that program . . . and not felt, with a sense of deep satisfaction, that the Race is making progress in music,” wrote Robert Abbot, editor of the Chicago Defender, arguably the most important and most widely read Black publication in America at the time. “First there was a feeling of awe as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an aggregation of master musicians of the white race, and directed by Dr. Frederick Stock, internationally known conductor, swung into the beautiful, harmonious strains of a composition by a Race woman.” In the same paper, Nahum Daniel Brasher wrote, “It is the beginning of a new era for us in the world of music.”

Dressed in a long, white gown, Price was called to the stage again and again after the performance to share the enthusiastic response with Stock and the Orchestra members. It was a startlingly unfamiliar sight: a lone Black woman in an all-white, all-male community, the image perfectly symbolizing the singularity of Black success in the blinding whiteness of the mainstream classical music world.

It was a startlingly unfamiliar sight: a lone Black woman in an all-white, all-male community, the image perfectly symbolizing the singularity of Black success in the blinding whiteness of the mainstream classical music world.

As in the old European model — including Dvořák’s long-famous New World Symphony of 1893 — Price’s Symphony No. 1 has four movements in the familiar sequence: a broad and vigorous opening Allegro in sonata form, a slow movement, a dance-like “scherzo,” and a big, rousing finale. But the material they are made from — the colors of their harmonies, the cut of their melodies, the sonorities of the instrumental combinations — often come from a different world. Price begins her first symphony with a syncopated bassoon solo that immediately recalls Dvorák’s New World, but as the first movement continues — in textbook sonata form — Price’s own distinct voice emerges from the fabric of late-nineteenth-century symphonic tradition. For her second movement, a stately Largo, Price writes a new hymn for brass choir that grows into a movement nearly as spacious and substantial as the first.

For the third movement — where Mozart wrote minuets and Beethoven composed scherzos — Price writes “Juba,” based on the syncopations of “pattin’ juba” — the sort of slave fiddler and banjo player music Solomon Northup describes in his 1853 autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave:

The patting is performed by striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other — all the while keeping time with the feet and singing.

The finale is an energetic rondo that makes abundant use of the pentatonic scale, familiar throughout jazz and blues, a new-world interpretation of an old-world form.

An important postscript.

Six months after the premiere, Price ran into Stock on Michigan Avenue. They stopped to talk. He agreed to let her sit in on some Chicago Symphony rehearsals — two days later she heard Artur Schnabel and Stock prepare Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto — and he encouraged her to continue work on her new piano concerto. But he did not program it — or any of Price’s other works. Her subsequent appeals to Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony and a well-known champion of new music, are now classics in the long history of composers cast aside because of their color or gender. She wrote him seven times, beginning in 1935, making the case for her symphonies. “To begin with,” she wrote in a long letter on July 5, 1943, “I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. I should like to be judged on merit alone.” In another: “Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic, and virility,” she said. “Add to that the incident of race — I have Colored blood in my veins — and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”

She received two responses from Koussevitzky’s secretary. In 1944, Koussevitzky finally looked at one of Price’s scores, but he never conducted any of her music. Early in 1951, Price received a telegram from Sir John Barbirolli, who had heard about her during his time as music director of the New York Philharmonic, asking her to write a concert overture or a suite based on Black American spirituals that he could play with his current orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England. Price did write an overture — the score is now lost—and Barbirolli premiered it in the spring of 1951, but Price was in the hospital at the time for an extended stay and could not travel to hear it. She died of a stroke in Chicago two years later.

In 1964, an elementary school on South Drexel Boulevard, in North Kenwood, near Price’s old neighborhood, was named for her. But in 2011, Chicago Public School officials closed Florence B. Price Elementary after four years of chronic poor performance on state standardized tests. The manuscripts discovered in St. Anne contained many lost works, including two violin concertos and a fourth symphony—music that came painfully close to vanishing forever. The Chicago Symphony did not play another note of Price’s music until May 2013, when it programmed her Mississippi River Suite. Riccardo Muti originally planned to give the first Chicago performances of Price’s Third Symphony in Orchestra Hall in the spring of 2020, but those concerts were among the first to be canceled in the pandemic. Muti was able to perform the Third Symphony in May 2022 —eighty-nine years after the Orchestra unveiled her first symphony (her second is lost, aside from a single page). He and the Orchestra then took the Third Symphony on tour in January, where it was given its first European performances in Luxembourg and in Vienna’s legendary Musikverein concert hall.

As Who Is Florence Price? says at the end, “Today Florence’s music can be heard all around the world, just like she dreamed of when she was young.”

*Who Is Florence Price?, the book written and illustrated by students of the Special Music School at Kaufman Music Center, in New York City, with an introduction by Jessie Montgomery, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, was published in 2021 by Schirmer Trade Books.