That disc, which should have made listeners eager to hear more of her music, featured performances of three of her orchestral works-the expansive Mississippi River Suite, her formidable Symphony No. Yet after her death, performances waned and, aside from a few of her spiritual arrangements being championed by Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price (no relation) who sang one at the White House in 1978, the only recording devoted exclusively to her music is a now out-of-print Women’s Philharmonic disc released in 2001 by Koch International Classics (which is now owned by E1 Entertainment and which they ought to reissue). By the time of her death in 1953, she had completed over 300 pieces of music, many of which received prominent performances-her Symphony in E Minor (her first), which Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony in the premiere of in 1933, was the very first symphony by an African-American woman ever performed by a major symphony orchestra in the United States and remains one of the few to this day.
In Chicago, she flourished as a composer, creating four symphonies, three piano concertos, and a violin concerto, plus numerous compositions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and choruses. While this was a tragedy for the people of Arkansas, it was a mitzvah to Florence Price whose music got to the attention of, among others, the prominent Chicago composer Leo Sowerby with whom she studied and who became a staunch advocate. But following a gruesome lynching, they and their two children relocated to Chicago in 1927 where she remained for the rest of her life. Price, who represented Black defendants arrested following the 1919 Arkansas race riots and was a founding member of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP. She returned to Arkansas and, in 1912, married a prominent Harvard-trained African-American lawyer Thomas J. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, she was admitted to the New England Conservatory as a keyboardist (performing on both piano and organ) at the age of 14 and wound up studying composition with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, two of the leading American symphonic composers at the dawn of the 20th century. “Blind Tom” Bethune) was tossing out tone clusters in a tone poem about the then-occurring American Civil War Battle of Manasses as far back as 1862 (when he was 12-years old)!Īnd then there’s Florence Beatrice Smith Price. Long before Charles Ives and Henry Cowell exploited the sonorities of tone clusters in their piano music, a blind composer-pianist raised as a slave named Thomas Wiggins (a.k.a. Probing deep into the history of American music, an intrepid musicologist will discover that long before Jerome Kern attempted to elevate the Broadway musical to the level of opera with his 1927 Show Boat (the plot of which is curiously about miscegenation) and George Gershwin attempted to bring Broadway sensibilities to opera with his 1935 Porgy and Bess (the plot of which focuses on African Americans), the African-American “king of ragtime” Scott Joplin created an opera that did both- Treemonisha-in 1911. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), Ulysses Kay (1917-1995), and many others have yet to enter the standard repertoire of concert halls. While a handful of African-American composers alive now have the opportunity to hear their music performed by orchestras and other large-scale enterprises around the country and the past giants of jazz, blues, and other genres are rightfully revered (some even on postage stamps), pioneers like William Grant Still (1895-1978), R. Day, I thought it was an appropriate day to listen almost exclusively to music by African-American classical music composers-a group of composers who all too often get excluded from the pantheon of our nation’s most significant creative artists even at a time when we make extremely valiant attempts to celebrate diversity. Since yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr.
New Black Repertory Ensemble conducted by Leslie B.