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\u2018I ha<\/span>ve two handicaps \u2013 those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.\u2019 Florence Price\u2019s assessment of her standing as a classical composer was all too accurate.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a mixed-race family of African-American descent, Florence Price<\/a><\/strong> spent much of her professional life grappling with what one writer has called the \u2018dangerous m\u00e9lange of segregation, Jim Crow laws, entrenched racism and sexism\u2019 in post-Civil War American society.<\/span><\/p>\n Price\u2019s family circumstances were, however, better than those of most other African-Americans. Her father was a successful dentist, at a period when the number of Black dentists in the entire US barely reached double figures. <\/span><\/p>\n Her mother was a pianist and music teacher, and the family lived in a generously appointed home with its own reading room, a grand piano and elegant furniture. By the age of four, Florence had played her first piano recital, and by eleven her first composition was published. Hers was by any standards a comfortable, privileged childhood.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet the racist wolf continued to maraud in society at large. To avoid it, Price\u2019s mother took special measures when Florence went to study organ and piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston. \u2018My grandmother didn\u2019t want my mother to be a Negro,\u2019 one of Price\u2019s daughters later commented. \u2018So when she took her to Boston, she rented an expensive apartment with a maid and forced my mother to say her birthplace was not Little Rock but Mexico.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n Price flourished at college, and although she taught successfully after graduating in 1906 and had more pieces published, the path ahead was often rocky. For a time, after divorcing her abusive first husband, Thomas, in 1931, she worked as a cinema organist and wrote radio jingles to support two children as a single mother.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Her breakthrough finally came two years later, in 1933, when her Symphony No. 1 in E minor was premiered by the prestigious Chicago Symphony Orchestra \u2013 the first symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. Price had completed the work a year earlier, when it won the $500 first prize in a competition sponsored by the National Association for Negro Musicians.<\/span><\/p>\n The concert at the Auditorium Theatre on 15 June was part of the Century of Progress exposition at the Chicago World\u2019s Fair, and was billed \u2018The Negro in Music\u2019. Price\u2019s symphony shared the programme with works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T Burleigh, Roland Hayes and \u2013 bizarrely \u2013 John Powell, who held white supremacist views.<\/span><\/p>\n Price\u2019s symphony drew glowing accolades from the critics, one of whom experienced a \u2018feeling of awe\u2019 at witnessing \u2018the beautiful, harmonious strains of a composition by a Race woman\u2019 performed by \u2018an aggregation of master musicians of the white race\u2019, under the German conductor Frederick Stock, who had personally championed the piece. <\/span><\/p>\n The Symphony was \u2018a faultless work\u2019, the Chicago Daily News <\/i>reported, \u2018worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertory\u2019. Old prejudices die hard, however, and Price\u2019s First Symphony fell into obscurity in the decades following her death in 1953.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have, though, prompted a timely reappraisal of Price\u2019s place in American music history. <\/span><\/p>\n Recent recordings of the First Symphony \u2013 conductor Yannick N\u00e9zet-S\u00e9guin\u2019s with the Philadelphia Orchestra, in particular \u2013 have underlined its warmly Dvo\u0159\u00e1kian palette and the rich peppering of African-American melodic influences.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018We are waking up to the fact pregnant with possibilities that we already have a folk music<\/a><\/strong> in the Negro spirituals,\u2019 Price once wrote. \u2018It is simple heart music and therefore powerful.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHow racism affected Florence Price<\/h2>\n
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Where did Florence Price perform in Chicago?<\/h2>\n