By this time, Price’s career was in full swing: she worked as an organist for silent films, wrote and orchestrated music for WGN radio, and, through Bonds, came to be connected with several important figures in the black artistic community, Marian Anderson and Langston Hughes chief among them. Price and her husband divorced in 1931, after which time she and her daughters lived with Price’s former student and friend Margaret Bonds. Nathaniel Dett Club for Music and the Allied Arts, took courses at various local music schools (including the American Conservatory of Music, Chicago Musical College, and University of Chicago), and saw her first scores published by the G. She immersed herself in the city’s vibrant African-American cultural scene, joining the R. Due to rising racial tensions, the family (Price and her husband had two daughters) relocated to Chicago in 1927 and it was at this point that her compositional career really began to take flight. Returning to the South, she taught at schools in Arkansas and Georgia, before resettling in Little Rock in 1912 and marrying Thomas Price, an attorney. Born in Little Rock in 1887, she displayed early musical talent and, graduating high school at fourteen, enrolled at NEC, where she majored in organ and piano performance, while also studying composition with George Whitefield Chadwick. In those two sentences you find the fundamental conundrum that the Arkansas-native, New England Conservatory-trained Price faced throughout her career. “Add to that the incident of race – I have Colored blood in my veins – and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.” “Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, frothy, lacking in depth, logic and virility,” Florence Price wrote in a candid letter to the Boston Symphony’s music director, Serge Koussevitzky, in November 1943. Comments and suggestions are welcome at the bottom of the page or to Jonathan Blumhofer Repertoire florence series#This post is the twenty-second in a multipart Arts Fuse series dedicated to reevaluating neglected and overlooked orchestral music. It is one of the enduring ironies of classical music that so much of today’s repertoire was written by such a small number of people.
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