Florence Price

Florence Beatrice Smith was born on the ninth of April 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, the daughter of James H. Smith, a respected dentist and author, and his wife Florence, a music teacher who gave her daughter her first lessons. A gifted child, she gave her first piano performance at four and graduated from her schooling as valedictorian at fourteen.

In 1903 she entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, one of few Black students of her day, studying organ and piano pedagogy and graduating with honors in 1906. She returned South to teach, married attorney Thomas Price, and in 1927, amid the racial violence of the era, moved her family to Chicago, where she deepened her study of composition.

There her artistry flowered. Composing while recovering from a broken foot, she completed her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, which won first prize in the 1932 Wanamaker competition. On the fifteenth of June 1933, Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its premiere — the first symphony by an African American woman performed by a major American orchestra. Her music wove spirituals, the syncopated juba dance, and the sounds of Black life into the European symphonic tradition.

She wrote more than 300 works — symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and songs carried by artists such as Marian Anderson — before her death in Chicago on the third of June 1953. Long overlooked, her manuscripts were rediscovered in 2009, and her voice now sounds again in the great halls. Honor to Florence Price, who claimed a place no one had prepared for her, and made it hers.