Florence Priceaus modern

Florence Beatrice Smith Price (* 9 April 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas; † 3 June 1953 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American composer.

Life

Florence Beatrice Smith, daughter of music teacher Florence (Gulliver) and dentist James H. Smith, was born on 9 April 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children into an ethnically mixed family, and first performed as a pianist at the age of four. She had piano lessons with Charlotte Andrews Stephens at the primary schools in her hometown. Her first composition was published when she was eleven. After attending Capitol High School, she studied music theory with Frederick Shepherd Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick and organ with Henry Morton Dunham at the New England Conservatory from 1903 to 1906.

From 1906 to 1910 she taught in Arkansas at Shorter College, then at Clark Atlanta University until 1912. In 1912 she married the lawyer Thomas J. Price and settled in Little Rock, where she gave private lessons and devoted herself to composition. After racial unrest, she moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1927.

Here she studied composition and orchestration at the American Conservatory and Chicago Musical College with Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette and Leo Sowerby. She became part of the Chicago Black Renaissance, a Harlem Renaissance-oriented social and cultural movement of African American artists and writers, some of whose texts she set to music. Her early compositional successes included several piano pieces published in 1928 and the performance of her first spiritual-based fantasia, Nègre (1929), by her pupil Margaret Bonds in 1930. After her divorce from Thomas J. Price in 1931, she lived off her income as a piano teacher and the composition of popular songs, which she published under the pseudonym Vee Jay. She also worked as a silent film organist and orchestrated pieces for radio.

Her breakthrough as a composer came with her Symphony in E minor, which won her the Wanamaker Prize in 1932 and was premiered at the 1933 World’s Fair by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. Price thus became the first African-American woman to have her orchestral work performed by a major US orchestra. The following year, she performed her Concerto in One Movement for piano, with herself as soloist. Price’s arrangement of the spiritual My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord became best known – opera singer Marian Anderson performed it in front of 75,000 people at a historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after she had been barred from performing at Constitution Hall as a “woman of colour”. Price’s Symphony No. 3, begun in 1938, premiered in 1940 with the Detroit Civic Orchestra. In the same year, sponsored by John Alden Carpenter, she became a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). In England, the conductor John Barbirolli performed her Suite for Strings with the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester.

Despite individual successes, she was not accorded a place in the canon of American music history during her lifetime. The majority of her approximately 300 compositions remained unpublished. In 1943, she outlined her situation in a letter to the conductor Sergei Kusevitsky: “(…) I have two handicaps (…), I am a woman and I also have black blood in my veins.”

On 3 June 1953, Florence Price succumbed to a stroke in Chicago.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Price