The resurgence of works by the composer Florence Price continues unbated

Few composers have experienced the kind of meteoric rediscovery that Florence Price has enjoyed in the last decade. Nearly forgotten after she died in 1953 because she was a woman and African-American, her works can be heard on dozens of new recordings in recent years, including a disc released March 28 on Hyperion by pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet performing Price’s Piano Quintet in A Minor.

In addition, G. Schirmer announced in November 2018 that it had acquired the international publishing rights to Price’s music, and the firm has published more than 100 compositions, with several other firms jumping into the mix in 2024 after her copyrighted works passed into the public domain.

“That is the most sustained revival of public and scholarly interest in a composer since the mid-20th century rediscovered Mahler,” said Michael Cooper, professor of music at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. “I think we’re looking at something that is more than a moment here. I think it has the potential to be a movement in the sense that the Bach revival became a movement in the early 19th century or the Mahler revival became a movement in the late 20th century.”

Guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present the CSO’s first-ever performances of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on June 5-7. Randall Goosby, who won the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2022, will serve as soloist.

The CSO presented the milestone premiere of Price’s Symphony No. 1, considered the first work by a female Black composer to be performed by a major orchestra, in conjunction with the World’s Fair of 1933. The CSO has championed other Price works in recent years. During the COVID-19 hiatus, a group of CSO musicians performed the composer’s Five American Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartetm as part of a CSO Sessions online program.

After spending the first part of her career in Little Rock, Arkansas, the composer, who was born on April 9, 1887, left in the late 1920s for Chicago, fleeing rising racial violence in her native city and domestic abuse at the hands of her first husband. She went on to enjoy her greatest successes in the succeeding decades, filling out a lifetime catalog of compositions that includes four symphonies, three concertos and many chamber music and organ works.

As part of his ongoing musicological research, Cooper heard the few works of Price that were known in the 1980s; since then, he has been a fan. “She was clearly a serious composer to be reckoned with,” he said. In 2011, on “kind of a lark,” he began compiling a list of her works and working to find where some of the missing ones were housed. “Because someone who could produce music of that quality so consistently had to have produced many, many other works, and I knew that she had a long and incredibly productive career.”

A few years later, Cooper traveled to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where about 70 percent of her manuscripts are held, with the mission of editing some of the works and preparing them for publication. All composers have up and down days, and he expected to find pieces that were good, some that were very good and maybe a few that were excellent but also ones that were not exactly top drawer. “What I found instead was one piece after another that was just stunning in its originality, invention, tunefulness, harmonic richness and instrumentation — everything. Even though you could tell that they all flowed from a single stream, as it were, every work was so different form every other one that I was driven to keep editing.”

When G. Schirmer acquired the publishing rights to Price’s compositions, the firm learned that Cooper had already edited a group of her works, most in 2017-18, and approached him about publishing those editions and doing more. To date, 72 of his editions have been released, starting in September 2019 with the debut edition of Price’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (1935).

Earlier this year, for example, his editions of Five Pieces for Piano Solo and 17 Art Songs and Spirituals for Medium-High Voice were published by ClarNan Editions, a small Arkansas-based firm that was first to publish Price’s music posthumously in the 1990s.

Many of Price’s works, which number 423 by Cooper’s latest count, remain unpublished, but Cooper said he has a lead on a cache of them, which he believes contains at least three major works, including her Second Symphony, Second Piano Concerto and a major choral work. But he has not yet been able to confirm what is there because has been focused recently on another pioneering Black composer, Margaret Bonds. His biography of her was published March 25 as part of the Oxford University Press’ Composers Across Cultures series. “They’re actually not hard to locate,” he said of Price’s manuscripts. “They’re kind of hiding in plain sight. It’s just that no one has actually looked for them.”

Manuscripts like a symphony score, which can be easily be 100 pages or more, plus a set of parts, especially those by a noted composer like Price, Cooper said, disappear only under very limited circumstances. One of those would be if a library or archive where the work is housed is destroyed by war or catches fire. The second would be if they are acquired by a private collector and essentially pass from public view. “In the first of those cases,” he said, “the piece is effectively lost and in the second, the piece still exists but it is just inaccessible, but by backtracking, we can eventually get to it.” For these reasons, Cooper remains confident more of Price’s works will resurface.

One work Cooper has not yet edited is Five American Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet, so CSO musicians used an edition from another source. Price wrote her first string quartet in 1929, about 1½ years after moving to Chicago, and her second one came in 1935, but it went unpublished until Cooper’s edition. She didn’t return to the form until the 1940s, when she wrote Negro Folksongs for String Quartet, which consisted of Price’s takes on four spirituals and folk songs. It was performed in Chicago in 1946.

Then in 1951 or slightly later, according to Cooper, she wrote what was first known as the String Quartet on Negro Themes, which consisted of adaptations of three songs, including “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” She then added two more songs, including “Clementine,” changing the name of the 20-minute work first to Five Folksongs in Counterpoint and then Five American Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet. Because of the similarity of their titles, the 1940s and ’50s works are sometimes confused.

Why did Price want to create instrumental versions of well-known spirituals and folk songs for string quartet? Cooper conjectures that she would have been well versed in the history of the string quartet from her extensive studies at the New England Conservatory and elsewhere. And one theme running through those discussions was what Cooper described as Goethe’s notion of the form as a “conversation among four equally intelligent gentlemen.” Because counterpoint is all about the equitable interaction of all the parts, the string quartet became a natural vehicle for these undertakings. “And that’s how all of these songs are written,” Cooper said. “Every instrument participates as an equal partner in the conversation among the four.” 

At the same time, a significant aspect of Price’s music was finding ways to integrate musical genres that were traditionally segregated from one another — in this case, African-American folk songs and the string quartet. There was little or no precedent or model for such a fusion, so it provided her with a compositional challenge — one she obviously relished — to treat these songs in a contrapuntal fashion and explore the musical potential of these time-honored classics.

“That is typical of Price,” Cooper said. “In a world that worked so hard to dehumanize her and lessen her as a woman and an African-American, she was determined, not in an overcompensating way but just being honest, to show that she could do this. Almost every composition I know by her, and there are still many that we haven’t seen, appears to be something where she has an unstoppable musical imagination that is spurred by a challenge, something like what we described here, taking two things that are never ever put together and finding a way to make sense together, to integrate them.”

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Sounds & Stories, the predecessor site of Experience CSO.