The following remarks were given at Susquehanna University on January 22, 2020 as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Teach-In. The text has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Good Afternoon. Today at Susquehanna University, we examine the legacy and impact of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and renew our efforts to break down the systems of oppression and marginalization for persons of color, for women, and—as Dr. King urged—the poor of our society generally. Today, we investigate the plagues of racism and sexism on our society. As we process these fault lines, it is important to consider the many different ways that a range of important figures have made critical contributions to a more just and equitable world. In learning about them, we increase our ability to make our own contributions.
In this hour, we will discuss one such figure, the composer Florence Price, the first African American woman composer to see her music performed by a major American orchestra. To do so, we must learn about her life and place her in historical context. However, given her life as a composer, we must honor her work by sharing her work. Music offers a way of knowing the world that no speech could ever replace. Therefore, we will spend much of our time in celebration of her remarkable musical output.
To the professional and student musicians in the room: it is my hope that when we leave this room, you will join me in including her music in your recitals, concerts, and recordings. To the lovers of music in the room, I hope you will join me in treasuring every opportunity to immerse yourselves in her musical worldview.
Let us begin our exploration with a small sampling of Price’s œuvre in order to help place her sound world in mind. As this will be the first listening experience of her music for many in attendance, I will not be presenting an analysis of the music itself, instead leaving it to the listener to appreciate it for its more affective and autobiographical qualities. Here is Price’s arrangement of “At the Feet O Jesus,” further arranged for Tenor and Marimba Ensemble and performed by Marquese Carter and the Georgia southern marimba ensemble. (The selection begins at 9:00.)
Florence Price was everything that a classical composer wasn’t supposed to be. She was black in a sea of white faces. She was a woman in a male-dominated space. She was a mother in a community of libertines. She was an American at a time when European imports were uniformly preferred. She was biracial living in the south just decades after the Civil War. And she grew up in Arkansas, the heartland, which is about as far from the coastal classical establishment as one could be. In short, Price was the quintessential American Maverick.
The many dead, white, European composers offer a striking contrast to Florence Price.
Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, just one generation after the Civil War. This lovely perspective map does much to put a gloss on the savagery of the time, so we’ll have to discuss it. we see the sobering fractures of that conflict in our society all the way to the present day. By contrast, in 1887 the ground was still being painted red from the spilt blood, in this case, of lynched former slaves aspiring to rise from their former circumstances.
This was the same year as Eubie Blake, Arthur Rubinstein, and Nadia Boulanger were born.
The young Smith attended the same elementary school and had the same school teacher as William Grant Still, who also grew up in Little Rock, later would. She had a promising musical childhood which included highlights such as her first published composition at the tender age of 11. For reference, Beethoven was 12 when his first work was published.
We will now listen to another of her compositions, her piano Concerto in one movement. While it is called a Piano Concerto in One Movement, it is divisible into three main sections. We’ll listen to the first as performed by the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs and Karen Walwyn.
In addition to showing ability as a composer, Price was a gifted pianist and organist.
She entered the New England Conservatory in 1901 at just 14 where she double majored in Piano and Organ and studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Chadwick was the Director of the conservatory and was known to accept only a few students. As a teenager, she composed her first string trio and symphony in turn-of-the-century Boston. Nearby in Boston, at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in 1903, the Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in Game 8 of the inaugural World Series.
George Chadwick, a young Florence Price, and Frederick Converse
Price went on to graduate from the New England Conservatory with an Artist Diploma and a teaching certificate 1906. She was hired at age 19 to begin teaching at Shorter College in Arkansas, to which she had returned after graduating.
Price’s tender teenage years were not devoid of racial resentments or the tragic self-abnegation required of citizens growing up black in America, then or now. Her black mother listed her biracial daughter as Mexican when helping enter her into the Boston Conservatory. That said, from the documentary record, her early years appear to have been relatively free of the most strident excesses of the burning racial resentments which characterized life in turn-of-the-century America.
All of that changed after the lynching of Homer G. Blackman, leading to what is known as the Argenta Race Riot of 1906. (Argenta is now North Little Rock.) For a young black woman simply attempting to return to her home and lead a peaceful and productive life, this was the homecoming from hell.
Life carried young Florence Beatrice Smith to Atlanta for a brief time before returning her again to Little Rock in 1912. That same year, Florence married a lawyer by the name of Thomas Price. The couple soon had two daughters together.
For context, musicians might remember the twin riots from around the same time period: one following a Vienna concert featuring music by Schoenberg and his disciples (the Skandalkonzert), and a later riot following premiere of the Rite of Spring in Paris. These both took place in 1913, just one year later. Certainly, one cannot help but feel a bit of trepidation in using that same word “riot” to refer to the events in Arkansas and across the south, events denoting massacres of persons fighting for their right simply to live in peace, and those in Europe, among over-cultivated taste makers. That said, the juxtaposition becomes all the more visible in so doing.
The south continued as a broiling cauldron of racial resentment on the part of white America and untold horror for black America. The Elaine massacre of 1919, which took place in Phillips County, Arkansas, claimed the lives of 237 African Americans and is considered one of the deadliest acts of racial terrorism in U.S. History and doubtless so when counted alongside the other riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919.
As we continue to progress, let us again return to Price’s catalog. Bear in mind that these works of profound beauty and intricate structure came forth from a mind and soul that persevered through the poisonous atmosphere in which she was brought up.
We will now turn to one her most beloved works, her string Quartet in G Major. This two-movement work will offer us an extended opportunity to engage with her music through active listening.
It was in this context of racial brutality that the Price family was eventually uprooted from Little Rock to Chicago in 1927. Her move is part of a larger pattern of black migration of former slaves moving to northern cities in an attempt to escape the genocidal assault on their lives and basic human dignity throughout much of the south. Chicago became particularly well-known as a hub for black life and black thought, and had its own Chicago Black Renaissance comparable in many respects to the more well-known Harlem Renaissance.
Price was an inveterate entrepreneur and already counted many influential black Chicagoans of the time as acquaintances and friends, evidence of which comes to us from vast troves of her correspondence. However, moving to Chicago, her circles expanded to include W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglass, who frequently passed through the major cities, including Chicago.
Price would integrate deeply with a number of important musical organizations, several of which were founded in Chicago during her lifetime. She would assume a variety of leadership roles. Here, for instance, we see a picture of her with the National Association of Negro Musicians board members.
Price’s rise to prominence began in earnest in 1932 when Florence took home first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Symphony in E Minor. Let’s listen to an excerpt from her first symphony, performed by Akiko Fujimoto and the Minnesota Orchestra.
Price came into her own in 1933 on the occasion of the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair was titled “A Century of Progress.” While this claim of “progress” may have fallen a bit flat when it comes to considering the way that Jim Crow had all but wiped out the temporary gains of the Reconstruction era, in at least one narrow regard, some laudable was being made.
Iconic Chicago symphony conductor Frederic Stock had programmed a concert of music by (almost) all African American composers in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.
It is important to bear in mind that Price was a brilliant artist and mover and shaker in her own right, and her success is built not on white beneficence but on her own black perseverance.
As the women's rights movement grew in the late 19th century, many African American women experienced increased political consciousness, and "began to re-imagine and implement new strategies anchored in strategic performance of black femininity in public acts of protest," according to Treva Lindsey, author of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in D.C. This connection was observed last year by Price scholar and activist Alisha Jones.
This “strategic performance” is noticeable in the Price saga when considering further episodes, such as one in 1939. Famed Contralto Marian Anderson was originally to have performed a recital in constitution hall, but an organization called the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Anderson from performing in Constitution Hall, utilizing loosely-enforced segregation laws against her. In response, Anderson was invited by Howard University and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to perform a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Now, rather than singing for a few dozen racist socialites, Anderson would sing before 75,000 attendees. This was a sizable upgrade.
Importantly, Anderson chose to close her historic Lincoln Memorial concert, which also featured with Price's arrangement of "My soul's been Anchored in de Lord.” Jones noted that, unlike the male composers on the recital program, Anderson made a point to list Price’s full name, revealing her gender. Let’s listen:
Anderson later performed this work in a broadcast setting, on the Bell Telephone Hour, expanding the reach of Price’s coloristic harmonizations and rhythmic characterizations to millions.
The First Lady later supported Price by writing about the premiere of her Symphony No. 3 in her syndicated column, “My Day.” The Susquehanna University Symphony Orchestra will be performing her 3rd symphony, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, on February 29.
There is not adequate time to delve into many of the issues and problems facing Price’s music today, but some time after her death in 1953, much of her music was lost, and what extant music there was lived in relative obscurity, in part due to the dismissal of the white establishment. (Important scholars like Rae Linda Brown kept the torch burning bright during the interegnum. )
That all changed when a large cache of her music was discovered in a small cabin in St. Anne, Illinois in 2009. Since that time, her music has slowly but certainly been brought into a wider light, work by work, including world premiere performances of many works which Price went to the grave having never heard. One such example is her glorious second violin concerto, which received its world premiere recording less than two years ago with Er-Gene Kahng performing the violin solo with the Janáček Philharmonic.
In view of Price’s tremendous accomplishments, it is time for the academy to shed the prevailing images of classical music and musicians that persist to this day. No longer can can it remain a safe space exclusively of, for, and by white men. Much progress has been made (see here and here) in the process of bringing these riches into public consciousness, but much remains to be done.
This image of classical music as the domain of white men persists, and it unfortunately does so with good reason.
It (almost) goes without saying: the music of composers like Beethoven and Brahms isn’t going anywhere. Cherished repertoire of the past will always have a welcoming space in the concert hall. That said, it is time to finally and fully celebrate the vibrant history of all women and all persons of color who have been the creators and performers of some of music’s greatest riches as a regular part of the concert going experience. We must endeavor to honor Florence Price as a pioneer and secure her place in the musical canon through a rigorous exploration of her music and a zealous advocacy for her legacy.