Florence Price: Performed, Praised, Then Left on a Shelf

15 June 1933. The Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, during the World’s Fair. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Frederick Stock, plays Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor. In the orchestra’s own words, it was the first large-scale composition by a Black woman composer performed by one of the major American orchestras. Price had won a Wanamaker prize for it the year before. The Chicago press wrote that it deserved a place in the regular repertoire.

So this is not a story about a composer nobody wanted. She was performed, she was praised, and she was taken seriously by one of the best orchestras in the country. Her music kept being played in her lifetime. The Detroit Symphony played her Third Symphony in 1940. Then she died in 1953, and the music went quiet. By the Chicago Symphony’s own account, it didn’t programme her again until 2013.

Eighty years. Not lost. Unattended.

The accident that changed things came in 2009. Vicky and Darrell Gatwood were renovating a vandalised house in St Anne, Illinois, connected to Price’s family, and found manuscripts and letters. The find reportedly included two violin concertos and a fourth symphony. It was luck, not a search. Her papers now sit in the University of Arkansas Special Collections, and the recordings followed. The Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin won a Grammy in 2022 for their recording of her first and third symphonies.

Play the third movement of that first symphony and you’ll hear why it matters. It’s a Juba Dance, about four minutes long, standing in the place a Romantic symphony would give to a scherzo. It’s built on syncopation and a pentatonic melody, and the juba was a dance with roots in slavery. It’s a European form carrying an American musical inheritance, written by a composer who had every right to claim both.

Here is the question worth sitting with, and it’s why Black History Month still matters. Who decides which composers get catalogued, published and recorded, and what happens to the ones nobody tends? If a symphony praised by the Chicago press can go unplayed for eighty years, what else is on a shelf somewhere, waiting for someone to look?

Here’s something you can use on Monday. Play your class the Juba Dance without saying who wrote it. Ask them to clap the syncopation, identify the tonality, and guess the country and the century. Then tell them who she was, and ask them why they’ve probably never heard of her. I’m adding Price to the bank so you can cue it in seconds.

Track of the Week

54 46 Was My Number by The Maytals — featuring Syncopation, Call and response, Chromatic movement, Melody and accompaniment

Listen on YouTube

Enjoying this? Forward it to a colleague who teaches music.