Florence Beatrice Smith Price was an American composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Price was born on April 9, 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a middle-class family where her father was the only African American dentist in the city and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence’s early musical training. She gave her first piano concert at the age of four and had her first composition published at the age of 11. By the time she was 14, Price had graduated as valedictorian of her class and later enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with a major in piano and organ. At the Conservatory, she studied composition and counterpoint with composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Also while there, Smith wrote her first string trio and symphony. She graduated in 1906 with honors, with both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.
Smith returned to Arkansas, where she taught for a short time before moving to Atlanta in 1910. There she became the head of the music department of what is now Clark Atlanta University, an HBCU (historically black college and university). In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer. She moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had his practice. 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, a major industrial city. There Florence Price began a new and fulfilling period in her composition career. She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city. Price was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music. Challenging times came with financial struggles and abuse by her husband, so Price filed for divorce and became a single mother who worked as an organist to make ends meet. Finally, she decided to stay with her student and friend Margaret Bonds, also a black pianist and composer. This friendship connected Price with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the art world who aided in Price’s future success as a composer. Together, Price and Bonds achieved national recognition for their compositions and performances.
Although she was a successful artist during her lifetime, she was often discriminated against as a black woman and after her death in 1953 her music was forgotten. Only since the rediscovery of an extensive collection of her works in 2009 has much of her music become accessible again. These works include her Concert Overture No. 2 (1943) for orchestra, which was performed for the first time in the UK in 2018 by the BBC Concert Orchestra under the direction of Jane Glover. This was thanks to the sponsorship of Dr. Shirley Thompson OBE and her involvement in BBC Radio 3’s “The women erased from musical history” project on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2018.
Overall, Price is known as the first African American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed numerous works: four symphonies, four concertos, choral works, art songs, and music for chamber and solo instruments.