A horrific racially motivated attack in the 1920s led Florence Price (1887-1953) to transform from an obscure piano teacher into a world-class pianist and classical music composer. Largely lost to history, now Price's music is enjoying a renaissance.
The background, though, is harrowing.
On May 4, 1927, in Arkansas, a Black man named John Carter saved a white woman and her daughter from a bolting horse. But the story morphed from heroic to horrific when a mob wrongly accused Carter of having assaulted the mother and daughter, according to the Arkansas Times.
The crazed crowd lynched Carter from a telephone pole in downtown Little Rock and riddled his body with bullets, according to the Equal Justice Institute. His mangled corpse was dragged through streets by car to the heart of the city's African American community, and set ablaze.
Know When To Flee Like Florence Price
That intersection was also the location of the law office of Black attorney Thomas Jewell Price. Price's wife, Florence, was a piano teacher, Berklee College of Music Prof. Karen Walwyn told Investor's Business Daily. Amid rumors that vigilantes would attack young Black girls, Walwyn says, the Prices fled to Chicago.
Paradoxically, that relocation helped Florence Price grow into a world-class pianist and classical music composer. Still, in her lifetime, orchestras and publishers almost entirely ignored her work because of her race and gender, says pianist Walwyn, a recording artist and Florence Price scholar. That's changing now.
The Price rediscovery is occurring largely because a treasure trove of Price's compositions was found by chance in 2009 in Price's abandoned summer home. Now musicians are performing and recording them, refueling interest in her work.
Be Unique Like Florence Price
The crux of her importance and uniqueness? She does the best job of any American composer "of giving voice to ideas, styles, and techniques that were authentic to her own position as an African-American, but also doing those things in the context of classical styles and forms, genres," John Michael Cooper, Professor of Music at Southwestern University, told IBD.
Price took techniques that African Americans traditionally have used in church music, applied them to classical European structures like sonatas, symphonies and piano solos, and conveyed thoughts and feelings about the human experience in general and the African American experience in particular.
"She's an American composer writing in a Western classical style using American idioms," pianist Kevin Wayne Bumpers, an Associate Professor Senior at Miami Dade College Kendall Campus, told IBD. Bumpers added, "She wrote in an American style, using American idioms like jazz, blues, spirituals and folk tunes."
Be True To Your Roots
Price's work is emphatically American. Walwyn said, "Florence Price's music is what I call ... the colorful painting of what our society could look like in the way that she combines rhythms from West Africa, melodies from plantation songs, European structures like the symphony, the sonata, the trailers to fantasies, and brings everything together. She shares her stories. She shares her heritage."
Chicago's African American community was larger than the one in Boston, where she had gone to college. Because of the Black community's size and vibrancy, Price was free to be herself and to explore ideas and music that were important to her and to Black people overall. In contrast, in Boston she had felt compelled to pass as Mexican rather than Black.
Crucially, Price also got involved with Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Center, a settlement house that in many ways functioned like a university. It brought together people with diverse talents, offered housing at modest rents, communal dining and provided many residents with teaching and performance jobs. Price taught piano, her main means of support. She also studied music composition.
Cooper told IBD, "She also interacted with Chicago's South Side Writers Group, which included some of the leading progressive African American artists of the day, poets and so on. Langston Hughes (a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and columnist, who was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, whose heyday was the 1920s and 1930s) also frequented (the Center) even though he was not from Chicago. Basically, what this amounted to was a kind of support for Florence Price that enabled her to build a community, a following, establish a reputation that would've been much more difficult if she were not in the Abraham Lincoln Center."
Keep Learning Like Price
Price also studied at several colleges in Chicago.
In Price's lifetime, publishers had spurned publishing any of it except for "a handful of her very many smaller pieces — the shorter piano pieces and the art songs," Cooper said. The problems? Racism and sexism. In her time, broad mainstream society expected composers, especially classical music composers, to be white, male and a century or more in their grave.
Price was aware of the problem. She wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, famed conductor of the renowned Boston Symphony Orchestra, asking him to consider performing her work. Up-front, she tried to neutralize his assumptions with candor. "My dear Dr. Koussevitzky: To begin with I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. (Now that you know) the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman's composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content; — until you shall have examined some of my work?"
Koussevitzky never responded personally to multiple letters from Price, Walwyn says.
Price: Keep Trying To Break Through
Still, despite such setbacks, Price finally began to receive recognition in her own time. In 1926 she won second prize in the Holstein Competition for a piano suite. She won first and third prizes as well as an honorable mention in the 1932 Rodman Wannamaker Foundation Awards.
The next year, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1, making Price the first Black woman composer to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra. The performance was at the Chicago World's Fair.
Decades later, in 2022, a recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra of two of her symphonies posthumously won a Grammy Award.
By the time she died of a stroke around age 66 in 1953 — Cooper says Price was born in either 1887 or 1888 — Price had created more than 450 works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, piano and organ solos and more, by Cooper's count. Major performers such as singer Marian Anderson regularly performed Price's work. Music publisher G. Schirmer bought all of Price's work in 2018.
Find Your Influence
Price's start in music came from her parents. She learned to play piano from her mother, who played for her church.
Price's father was another key influence. He became a dentist at a time when there were fewer than a dozen Black dentists in the U.S., Cooper says. He taught Florence to aim high and ignore limits that other people may try to set for you.
Further, his hobbies were painting and writing fiction. He taught Price to think artistically. His art was "about Black life in the South and things that deal with trying to give voice to Black experiences among whites in a fashion that is both authentic to Black people and comprehensible to white people," Cooper said. Much of Price's music can be described the same way.
Overcome Hurdles Like Price
Price had to constantly overcome hurdles. After graduating in 1906 from the New England Conservatory of Music, a prestigious private music college in Boston, she returned to Little Rock to teach. At the time, Black teachers earned about 25% less than whites, Cooper says.
After Price's father died in 1910, Price's mother relocated to Indiana. She married a white florist, and to assure that she herself could pass as white and avoid being treated as Black, she never again communicated with Price.
The Great Depression of the 1930s hurt Thomas Jewell Price's law practice. He became abusive to Florence and they divorced in 1931. She married baseball-player-turned-insurance-salesman Pusey Dell Arnett one month later. They separated a few years later.
"Florence Price had an incredible gift," Walwyn said. "She was able to transcend the tragedies in her life and clearly present music in which there aren't any mistakes. She had to write music. Nothing was going to stop her."
Price's Keys:
- First Black woman composer to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra, 1933.
- Overcame: Intense racism in her personal and professional lives.
- Lesson: "I should like to be judged on merit alone."
