Florence Price

Synopsis American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all. Her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra. The score for her second symphony is lost. Her Symphony No. 3, commissioned by the WPA Federal Music Project, was premiered on today’s date in 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra. Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her mother was a music teacher who guided her early musical training. At 14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time. After teaching in the south, she moved to Chicago in 1927, where she became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, who both helped promote her music. Price died in 1953. After decades of neglect, early 21st-century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career. Music Played in Today's Program Florence Price (1887-1953): Symphony No. 3; Women’s Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor; Koch 7518-2