Florence Beatrice Price was a daughter of a music teacher and of the only black dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they had settled after losing their home and business in the great Chicago fire.
She graduated high school as valedictorian at age 14 and entered the New England Conservatory of Music (at first passing as ‘Mexican’) where she studied with Boston composers George Whitefield Chadwick and Frederick Converse, graduating with honors.
She returned to Little Rock before Price and her attorney husband joined the great migration northward to Chicago in 1927. She became part of the Bronzeville renaissance… Chicago’s answer to Harlem’s cultural flowering… as she resumed study and began to publish. And to be performed: many of her works made a splash at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ World’s Exposition, especially her 1st Symphony, the first work by a black woman to be presented by a major orchestra.
After a divorce she raised her children and continued to compose. She made a solid professional living writing educational piano works, but also four symphonies, three concertos, suites, overtures, quartets and quintets, dozens of songs and piano solos… most of them believed lost after she died of a stroke in 1953.
She then became perhaps the most overlooked American symphonist of the 20th century. Overlooked enough that her 2nd symphony is entirely missing, and her 4th symphony was thought lost as well--- until 2009, when many lost Price manuscripts were discovered, scattered around a vandalized long-empty summer house just outside the rural Kankakee County hamlet of St. Anne, Illinois.
And the discoveries and reconstructions continue, with an explosion of recordings and publications and Grammy awards, making Price the greatest unlikely classical star so far in the 21st century.
Florence Beatrice Price… Classically Black.
