Waltzes & Character Pieces of Florence Price

Florence Beatrice Smith was born on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock AK.¹ In the decades after the Civil War, Little Rock developed a flourishing Black community with expanded educational access and improved economic standing. The Smiths were leaders in the community and ensured that Florence received an excellent education. She began piano lessons with her mother quite young, performing in her first recital at four years old. After studying piano and organ throughout her childhood, she was admitted to New England Conservatory, moving to Boston in 1903 to pursue a double major in organ performance and piano pedagogy.

After graduating in 1906, she began her teaching career, which included several years at Shorter College in Little Rock and two years as Head of the Music Department at Clark University in Atlanta GA. She married attorney Thomas Price in 1912 and moved with him back to Little Rock to start a family. Price continued to teach piano and began composing pieces for her students, often drawing on the southern landscape for inspiration. In the 1920s she started to enter her compositions in contests, resulting in her first publication, At the Cotton Gin: A Southern Sketch.

In the early decades of the 20th century, conditions worsened for Black citizens of Little Rock. Price was denied admission to Arkansas Music Teachers Association due to her race. Lynching and other acts of violence against Black Americans were more prominent than ever, and by the late 1920s Little Rock was no longer safe for Florence and her family. Price joined the Great Migration northward: she and her two children fled to Chicago in 1927, and her husband followed a few months later.

Price was familiar with Chicago, having attended summer music lessons at Chicago Musical College in 1926 and 1927. She soon found community at Grace Presbyterian Church and in the National Association of Negro Musicians, connecting her with musicians who wanted to hear and perform her work. She continued to teach piano and write pieces for children, several of which were published by Fischer, Presser, and Schirmer.

By the 1930s, Price turned her attention to larger forms. In 1932, she entered the Rodman Wanamaker competition for African American composers and won first prize with her Symphony No. 1 in E Minor. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price’s work at the Auditorium Theatre on June 15, 1933 — the first performance of a symphony by a Black woman by a major American orchestra.

Price’s compositional achievements came amid personal struggles. In her first few years in Chicago, Florence’s husband repeatedly assaulted her. She filed for divorce in 1930 and was granted sole custody of their two daughters. Price remarried soon after, more for financial stability than love. By 1934 she no longer lived with her second husband, though they never divorced. She and her daughters moved from apartment to apartment, at one point living with the family of Margaret Bonds, a young pianist and composer who premiered many of Price’s works. Though never destitute, she felt the pressures of financial insecurity and worked tirelessly composing and performing to provide for herself and her family.

In the 1930s and 1940s Price built on the successes of her First Symphony and continued to hone her mature style, drawing on both African American and European influences. She composed another symphony, a piano concerto, chamber music, works for organ and piano, choral music, and art songs, which were performed widely. After beginning to enjoy some international success in the early 1950s, Price died of heart disease on June 3, 1953.

In the decades following Price’s death, only a fraction of her compositional output remained available. Her legacy was maintained through the diligent activism of musicologists like Barbara Garvey-Jackson, Helen Walker-Hill, and Rae Linda Brown, but their scholarship was largely ignored in the classical music community. In 2009 a treasure trove of Price’s manuscripts were rediscovered in a former residence in Chicago. Hundreds of pieces, including every work on this album, were among the recovered documents. The manuscripts are now safely archived in the Special Collections of the University of Arkansas. Through the efforts of Barbara Garvey-Jackson and John Michael Cooper, many of these piano pieces have finally been published for the first time. My performances on this album are based on my own study of Price’s manuscripts at the University of Arkansas and differ in some details from the currently available published editions.

— Michael Clark

¹ The biographical details summarized here derive from Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020).