The Resurgent Florence Price
February 20, 2026
February 20, 2026
On June 15, 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed a brand new piece by an unknown composer. The work had won first prize in a competition and the music critic of the Chicago Daily News declared it “a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion… worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.” Nothing particularly unusual in that. But the unknown composer was a woman and she was African-American. [1]
That highly praised piece was Florence Price's Symphony No. 1. [below sidebar] The symphony in E minor combines Western symphonic influences, such as Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, with West-African musical styles - specifically the ‘Juba Dance’, a pre-cursor to ragtime, which the third movement of the work is built around and named after. [2]
Although she was more or less forgotten after her death in 1953 because she was a woman and African-American, Florence Price's works have become recognized in recent years as central to American classical music. One musicologist describes this resurgence as "the most sustained revival of public and scholarly interest in a composer since the mid-20th century rediscovered Mahler.” [4]
Born in Little Rock Arkansas in 1887, Florence Price gave her first piano performance at the age of four and had her first composition published at the age of 11. She studied music at the New England Conservatory and by age 23 she became the head of the music department of what is now Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer and moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she could not find work in the by now racially segregated town.
After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching of a Black man in 1927, the Price family decided to leave. Like many Black families living in the Deep South, they moved north in the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow conditions, and settled in Chicago.
There Florence Price began a new period in her career. She was part of the Chicago Black Renaissance; studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city; and published four pieces for piano in 1928. While in Chicago, Price was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher's College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music. During the 1930s, a number of Price's other orchestral works were played by the Works Progress Administration Symphony Orchestra of Detroit and the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago.
Few composers have experienced the kind of meteoric "rediscovery" that Florence Price has enjoyed in the last decade. Nearly forgotten after she died in 1953 because she was a woman and African-American, her works can be heard on dozens of new recordings and many live performances in recent years. [4]
In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in an abandoned dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, which Price had used as a summer home. These consisted of dozens of scores, including her two violin concertos, her fourth symphony and her largest choral work, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight. . As Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, "That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history."
Florence Price dedicated her second violin concerto [sidebar] to violinist Minnie Cedargreen Jemberg, who first performed it in 1964 at the opening of the Florence B. Price School in Chicago. Like the symphonies, Price calls both on the Western classical tradition, and West-African and African-American spiritual and dance traditions for this virtuosic concerto, which is written in a single 14-minute movement. [2]
Price's Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight [sidebar] is her largest choral work and one of her most overtly political compositions – a cantata outspoken in its anti-war stance and its decrials of socioeconomic inequality. The lyrics are verbatim those from Vachel Lindsay's poem of the same name. [3]
In recent years, musicologists have come to recognize the significance of Price's work. This ongoing appreciation has acknowledged that in the mid-twentieth century, Florence Price was overlooked and that this oversight was structural. Her work is now considered central to American classical music. [4]
Sources: [1] Classic FM - 1 , [2] Classic FM - 2, [3] UIS Observer, [4] Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Wikipedia