Biography
Florence Beatrice Smith entered the world on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the first African-American woman to have a major symphony orchestra perform her music and as a pioneering figure in twentieth-century American composition. Her profile has risen markedly in recent decades, fueled especially by the 2009 unearthing of an extensive cache of manuscripts.
Her father practiced dentistry while her mother taught music; all three siblings studied instruments, yet Florence stood out early, delivering her debut recital at age four. She and composer William Grant Still shared the same elementary school. After serving as valedictorian of her segregated Catholic high school, she had already seen her initial pieces appear in print. At the New England Conservatory of Music she concentrated on piano and organ with the intention of becoming a classroom instructor, while also studying composition under George Whitefield Chadwick. Chadwick, sharing Antonín Dvořák’s conviction that African-American idioms could underpin a distinctly national school of composition, actively encouraged her efforts. Following her 1906 graduation she returned to Arkansas for several years of teaching before assuming leadership of the music department at Clark Atlanta University. There she wed attorney Thomas J. Price; in 1927 the couple and their son left the South for Chicago, where she pursued further lessons with Leo Sowerby, William Dawson, and Will Marion Cook.
After the couple divorced, Price endured lean periods and briefly lodged with her student Margaret Bonds while composing radio jingles for income. Recognition arrived in 1932 when she earned multiple prizes in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition; the next year Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, marking the first time a major orchestra had programmed music by an African-American woman. In 1934 she appeared as soloist with the Chicago Women’s Symphony in her Piano Concerto in D minor. She produced extensive choral music for local radio broadcast along with chamber works, keyboard pieces, and songs. During the late 1930s Marian Anderson sang her setting of Langston Hughes’s cycle Songs to the Dark Virgin. Although her scores seldom quote spirituals directly, they employ call-and-response patterns and other structural traits typical of African-American musical practice.
Three additional symphonies followed, together with a string suite that John Barbirolli commissioned and conducted. Major African-American vocalists Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Roland Hayes performed her vocal music. She suffered a fatal stroke in Chicago on June 3, 1953. Modernist ascendancy in the 1960s and 1970s largely eclipsed her output, yet renewed attention to women composers gradually restored visibility; the 2009 discovery of manuscripts, including one symphony, in a St. Anne, Illinois, summer residence further elevated her standing. Conductor John Jeter has since recorded and promoted several of her orchestral scores, and in 2021 pianist Lara Downes featured Price in the Rising Sun series devoted to composers of diverse backgrounds.
Her father practiced dentistry while her mother taught music; all three siblings studied instruments, yet Florence stood out early, delivering her debut recital at age four. She and composer William Grant Still shared the same elementary school. After serving as valedictorian of her segregated Catholic high school, she had already seen her initial pieces appear in print. At the New England Conservatory of Music she concentrated on piano and organ with the intention of becoming a classroom instructor, while also studying composition under George Whitefield Chadwick. Chadwick, sharing Antonín Dvořák’s conviction that African-American idioms could underpin a distinctly national school of composition, actively encouraged her efforts. Following her 1906 graduation she returned to Arkansas for several years of teaching before assuming leadership of the music department at Clark Atlanta University. There she wed attorney Thomas J. Price; in 1927 the couple and their son left the South for Chicago, where she pursued further lessons with Leo Sowerby, William Dawson, and Will Marion Cook.
After the couple divorced, Price endured lean periods and briefly lodged with her student Margaret Bonds while composing radio jingles for income. Recognition arrived in 1932 when she earned multiple prizes in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition; the next year Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, marking the first time a major orchestra had programmed music by an African-American woman. In 1934 she appeared as soloist with the Chicago Women’s Symphony in her Piano Concerto in D minor. She produced extensive choral music for local radio broadcast along with chamber works, keyboard pieces, and songs. During the late 1930s Marian Anderson sang her setting of Langston Hughes’s cycle Songs to the Dark Virgin. Although her scores seldom quote spirituals directly, they employ call-and-response patterns and other structural traits typical of African-American musical practice.
Three additional symphonies followed, together with a string suite that John Barbirolli commissioned and conducted. Major African-American vocalists Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Roland Hayes performed her vocal music. She suffered a fatal stroke in Chicago on June 3, 1953. Modernist ascendancy in the 1960s and 1970s largely eclipsed her output, yet renewed attention to women composers gradually restored visibility; the 2009 discovery of manuscripts, including one symphony, in a St. Anne, Illinois, summer residence further elevated her standing. Conductor John Jeter has since recorded and promoted several of her orchestral scores, and in 2021 pianist Lara Downes featured Price in the Rising Sun series devoted to composers of diverse backgrounds.
Singles