(The river and the songs of those dwelling upon its banks)

Florence Price joined the already small field of African-American classical composers to become the first African-American woman composer to have a work played by a major orchestra. Born into a middle-class family in Little Rock, Arkansas, she received support from her dentist father in addition to early training in piano from her mother. Given the impossibility of getting a proper musical education in Little Rock, she traveled to Boston, where she earned degrees in organ performance and piano pedagogy.

Rather than remain in a more comfortable northern environment, Price returned to Little Rock and established a teaching career between 1907 and 1927 in two African-American colleges. She eventually became head of the music department at Clark College in Atlanta. After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Chicago, where she continued her education in composition. In 1932, she achieved national recognition when she won first prize in the Wanamaker competition for her Symphony No. 1, which was premiered the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Like so many Black composers of this period, Price supplemented her income by playing organ gigs for silent movies and writing choral or vocal arrangements for churches. And like so many women composers, she produced a significant body of art songs. Contralto Marian Anderson featured her arrangement of the spiritual “My soul's been anchored in de Lord” and Price’s own Songs to the Dark Virgin with a text by Langston Hughes.

Most of her manuscripts were thought to have been lost, but in 2009 a trove of them were discovered in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois. It turned out that the house had been the Price's summer home.

Price composed the Mississippi River Suite in 1934 as a pictorial description of the river and its people, although without a stated narrative. It focuses on six African-American hymns and spirituals, and even dances, separated by discursive interludes. It opens leisurely at the headwaters, with a quiet clarinet solo with a brass response, punctuated with birdsong. Price then introduces the first of the “…songs of [the River] and those dwelling on its banks", a native-American settlement, scored for Indian drums, marimba, timpani and other assorted percussion. As if creating musical foreshadowing, Price introduces one of the central themes of the suite, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” followed by a violent storm that suggests the periodic, devastating flooding – and perhaps human violences – of the normally sluggish river. When everything calms down, a band of future cowboys crosses the river to conquer the West (Aaron Copland used the same theme, “Come wrangle yer bronco,” in the ballet Billy the Kidd.

After an arrangement of “Stand Still Jordan”, Price arrives at the second major theme of the work, a setting of “Deep River” that morphs into “Go down Moses.” The Suite concludes with a reprise of the various themes and a rousing conclusion, which, if it has actually reached the Delta, gives no hint of the indigenous jazz of New Orleans.

As we emerge into an era of “politically correct” discourse and art, it is interesting to note that Florence Price came from a different world in which her musical education and subsequent career depended on her adapting to white – even elitist – aesthetic standards. Yet Price balanced the two traditions of her heritage and education with brilliance and grace. Her models must have been the amazingly popular works based on Middle European folk music of Brahms, Dvorak and Kodaly.