Florence Price

Florence Beatrice Smith was born on the eighth of April 1887 at Little Rock, Arkansas, the third child of James H. Smith — a dentist and the first Black dentist of Arkansas — and Florence Gulliver Smith, a music teacher and the principal of the Capitol Hill School for Coloured Children. She was educated in the Little Rock public schools under her mother’s direct supervision through high school and graduated as valedictorian at the Capitol Hill High School at fourteen.

She was admitted at fourteen in 1903 to the New England Conservatory of Music at Boston, where she completed the Bachelor of Music in 1906 in piano performance and organ — registering as Mexican to avoid the Boston racial restrictions of the period — under George Whitefield Chadwick and Frederick Converse. She returned to Little Rock in 1906 and taught at the Cotton Plant-Arkadelphia Academy and the Shorter College.

She married the lawyer Thomas Price in 1912 and moved with him to Chicago in 1927 following racial violence in Little Rock. She enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, the American Conservatory, and the Chicago Teachers College between 1927 and 1934, completing additional study in composition under Carl Busch and Wesley La Violette.

She completed her Symphony No. 1 in E minor in 1932, and the work won the Wanamaker Foundation Award in composition in 1932. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock premiered the symphony on the fifteenth of June 1933 at the Auditorium Theatre as part of the Century of Progress International Exposition — the first composition by an African American woman performed by a major American orchestra.

She composed across the following twenty years four symphonies, two violin concertos, three piano concertos, and over a hundred art-songs and choral works — many of which she could not get published or performed in her lifetime and which were recovered only after the 2009 discovery of her papers at her summer house at Saint Anne, Illinois.

She died at Chicago on the third of June 1953 of a stroke, at sixty-six.

She is honored here as the first African American woman performed by a major American orchestra.