As the first Black female American composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, Florence Price enjoyed considerable renown during her lifetime. Her compositional skill and fame notwithstanding, however, the entrenched institutional racism and sexism of the white male classical music establishment effectively erased Price and her music from general awareness for decades after her death in 1953. More than 50 years later, in 2009, a large collection of scores and unpublished works by Price were discovered in a house in rural Illinois. Since then, many ensembles and individual musicians have begun including Price’s music in concerts, and audiences are discovering her distinctive, polished body of work for the first time.
The daughter of a musical mother, Price was a prodigy, giving her first recital at age four and publishing her first composition at 11. During her childhood and teens in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price’s mother was the guiding force behind her piano and composition studies. In 1903, at age 16, Price won admittance to New England Conservatory (she had to “pass” as Mexican and listed her hometown as Pueblo, Mexico to circumvent prevailing racial bias against Blacks), where she double majored in organ performance and piano pedagogy. While at NEC, Price also studied composition with George Whitefield Chadwick. Chadwick was an early advocate for women composers, which was highly unusual at the time, and he believed, as did Antonín Dvořák before him, that American composers should incorporate the rich traditions of American vernacular sounds into their own music, rather than trying to imitate European styles.
Price, already inclined in this direction, was encouraged by Chadwick, and many of her works reflect the expressive, distinctive idioms of what were then referred to as “Negro” traditions: spirituals, ragtime, and folkdance rhythms whose origins trace back to Africa. In 1938, a year before she composed her first violin concerto, Price wrote, “We are even beginning to believe in the possibility of establishing a national musical idiom. We are waking up to the fact pregnant with possibilities that we already have a folk music in the Negro spirituals – music which is potent, poignant, compelling. It is simple heart music and therefore powerful. It runs the gamut of emotions.”
Price wrote several works featuring solo violin, including her two violin concertos. The first, completed in 1939, adheres to the typical concerto structure: three movements (fast-slow-fast). The opening Tempo moderato riffs on a “blue-note” theme (the use of certain flatted notes found in blues). The solo violin artfully executes virtuosic passages of notes while the orchestra supports and amplifies the vernacular quality of the harmonies. Price’s writing for solo violin demands all the technique and artistry found in the great 19th century violin concertos of Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, and she expands conventional melodic language by centering distinctively Black American turns of phrase. An expressive blues ballad pervades the Andante, in which the orchestra’s winds, particularly the clarinets, lend a moody, pensive character to the music. The Allegro’s quicksilver tempo and Expressionistic chromaticism reflect the style of classical writing current in the 1930s. Biographer Douglas Shadle observes that “the overall character of the movement is quite similar to the finale of Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, which dates from the same year.” The soloist is front and center throughout this movement, which ends with a an impressively virtuosic flourish.
© Elizabeth Schwartz