Book celebrates women who put Black classical music on the cultural map

English musicologist Samantha Ege wrote her doctoral dissertation on composer Florence Price and then became fascinated with the once-dynamic, yet now little-remembered Black classical-music scene in Chicago that embraced and supported her.

Price famously became the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented her Symphony No. 1 in 1933 as part of a program titled The Negro in Music. (The symphony’s premiere was conducted by second music director Frederick Stock and was given as part of the Century of Progress world’s fair.)

After her death 20 years later, Price sank into obscurity in large part because of prejudices about her race and sex, but her music has enjoyed an extraordinary revival in the last few decades and is now heard regularly in concert halls worldwide.

Ege brings that early 20th-century world to the fore in South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene, a book published by the University of Illinois Press as part of its Music in American Life series.

Ege, who also has a flourishing concert career as a piano soloist, gives due attention to Price in the book, but puts most of the focus on other lesser-known yet important Black composers, as well as key performers and patrons.

In recognition of Black History Month, Ege spoke about the book, the role of the CSO in its realization and the Black women beyond Price who have played an important role in shaping classical music in Chicago and beyond:

How do you divide your time between writing and research and performing?

It’s a juggling act. I recently recorded with the BBC Philharmonic, which is the biggest recording project I’ve ever done, and that has made me rethink my balance and allow my performance work to go off on its own tangent and not always be so tied to my academic work. Because if a huge opportunity comes, obviously I want to take it. I just constantly have to reassess what I can and can’t take on. There are a million books I want to write, but it’s realizing I can’t do everything.

How did you become interested in Florence Price?

When I was 19, I studied abroad. I’m from the United Kingdom, and I went to university in the U.K., but the main reason I picked the university I went to is because it had a study-abroad program. I really wanted to have the experience of going to Canada to study.

I went to McGill [a university in Montreal] in 2009, and I had a professor teach an early 20th-century music course. She had a lot of American music — Charles Ives, Gershwin, Copland, etc. — [on the syllabus], and then there were these names: Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. And I didn’t know anything about them. That’s when I learned about them for the first time and learned about Black women in classical music. That was quite a while ago, and the name, Florence Price, really stuck with me. It took awhile for me to figure out what I was going to do with that.

Have you been surprised by the pace and vigor of Price’s renaissance?

I definitely felt a sense of momentum when I started doing my research on Price and shared it on social media. I used to use Twitter to share my work. At that time, I was living in Singapore and doing my Ph.D. at a university in the U.K., so I was quite disconnected from the U.S. movement around her. But through social media, I was able to connect with other people, and it really felt like there was this momentum building and there were recordings by [violinist] Er-Gene Kahng [and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra] around 2018 of her lost works.

Did your research on Price lead to your book, South Side Impresarios?

It was. I was doing my Ph.D. on Florence Price specifically, but as I was thinking about ideas for a book, most people would turn their doctoral thesis into a book. But the more archival work I did in Chicago, especially at the Center for Black Music Research [at Columbia College], I felt like there was another story I wanted to tell. It was just fascinating that when you followed the thread of Florence, it leads you to so many other names. I thought, ‘Who are these women? And how can I tell this story?”

In the book, you call Chicago’s South Side a a key site in 20th-century classical-music-making. Can you explain that?

Obviously, many people think of Harlem as sort of the epicenter. But when you look at a lot of the activity that was happening in the early 20th century and the formation of key music clubs, and then you’ve got the Chicago Defender and all of this infrastructure working hand in hand, it gives you a completely different perspective on not only when this Black Renaissance begins, but where it begins. Chicago is clearly this center of classical-music creativity in a way that is quite different from the Harlem Renaissance, which is better known.

Is it fair to say that a central mission of this book is to counter what you call the “propagandized perception” that classical music is “an inherently white and male genre"?

Yes, when we learn about classical music, we learn about these schools of great men, which is the narrative in terms of how come to understand and periodize classical music in these vast spans of time. With that, there are certain voices that get lost; when you take Florence Price as an individual rather than looking at her in the context of her community, she kind of stands out in all the wrong ways.

I’ll give you an example. With this Florence Price renaissance, you’ll often see introductions to her as the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. But I’ve also seen people say she is the first Black woman to write a symphony. And I think, hold on, that’s not a fact. That is such a huge assumption to make. I really wanted to dismantle that exceptionalism that is quite damaging, because through this research, I became aware of women much earlier than Florence Price who were writing if not specifically symphonies in the strictest sense, they were writing symphonic works, and they were doing that in Chicago or having their works championed in Chicago.

Could you cite three or four of the key women at the heart of this book and perhaps say a few words about them?

I’ll begin with Helen Hagan. I’ve been thinking about her a lot at the moment. Helen Hagan studied at Yale [University], and she was the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music. There were others who went before her, but they were denied their graduation certificates. In 1912, she wrote this piano concerto. In 1915, she was living in Chicago, and there was an annual concert for Black composers, and she played the two-piano arrangement of her piano concerto.

And on that program was another woman called Nora Holt, and Nora Holt was the first Black person in the U.S. of any gender to get a master of music degree. She got one from the Chicago Musical College for writing a symphonic work for a 100-piece orchestra based on what she called Negro themes. On that program you’ve also got Maude Roberts George, who was a soprano, and she sang one of Nora Holt’s compositions and Nora accompanied.

So, you’ve these three women who are transforming classical music in their own ways, and Nora Holt founded the National Association of Negro Musicians in Chicago in 1919 and she also had her own group before that called the Chicago Music Association. In the 1920s, she went to Paris to live a very scandalous, a very exciting life while also composing, and Maude Roberts George took over as president of those associations. And she was able to lead the charge in getting Florence Price in front of the Chicago Symphony, and she underwrote the cost of the concert that we all know as Price’s big moment.

What do you see as some of the biggest revelations in this book?

I really enjoyed getting to know Florence Price in a more personal way especially through the stories of [composer] Margaret Bonds. Toward the end of the book, I talk about how Florence Price is working on this symphony, and there is a written version of this story by Margaret Bonds, where it comes across as really serious. You really get a sense of how Price is struggling because she is going through a separation; she’s having to live with Bonds and her family, and she is really not on the most stable ground.

But when you hear Margaret Bonds describe this story in her own speaking voice, she laughs about how Price was a procrastinator, and that is an incredibly humanizing moment to know that someone of such high creative regard is someone who can struggle to get stuff done. It’s very easy to focus on the systemic barriers which kept Price from achieving what she wanted to achieve and overlook those moments of joyful sisterhood and just helping out a friend who gets easily distracted.

What role did the Chicago Symphony play in bringing your book together?

Frank Villella, director of the CSOA’s Rosenthal Archives was really wonderful in introducing me to a lot of the material that is in the book, especially the programs from the Auditorium Theatre and Orchestra Hall. Alsok the Chicago Symphony’s African American Network with Sheila Anne Dawson Jones — she was the person who invited me into the space to be able to share the work. [Jones, the CSO’s director of community stewardship, retired in 2022.]

That was my first experience of feeling part of a community of Black classical musicians, which growing up in the U.K. is not my experience at all. And that was such an empowering moment that when I came back [home] away from that, I more or less reconfigured my whole life, and I realized that I need to create the space to fully be able to do this research.  Those experiences were really important in helping me learn how to express myself through this book.

Are you already thinking about writing another book?

I have lots of idea for other books. I’ve spent so much time trying to excavate this history that is very much an American history, and I’m thinking about the importance of doing that for Black classical British stories. I think people are surprised that I’m not American, and I would like to explore some of the dialogue on my side of the pond as well, and I hope that those stories connect.