World Premiere: June 24, 1934

Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 19'

Piano Concerto in One Movement (1933-1934)

Florence B. Price

(Born April 9, 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas Died June 3, 1953 in Chicago)

Reconstructed (2011) by Trevor Weston (born in 1967)

Florence B. Price was a musical pioneer — one of the first African-American students to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music, the first African-American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra, the first winner of the composition contest sponsored by the progressive Wanamaker Foundation.

Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1887 into the prosperous and cultured family of a dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received her first piano lessons from her mother, a schoolteacher and singer; Florence first played in public when she was four. She later also took up organ and violin, and at age fourteen was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. After graduating with honors in 1907, she returned to Arkansas to teach at Arkadelphia Academy and Shorter College and was appointed music department chair at Clark University in Atlanta in 1910. She returned to Little Rock two years later to marry attorney Thomas J. Price, and left classroom teaching to devote herself to raising two daughters, giving private instruction in violin, organ and piano, and composing.

In 1927, following racial unrest in Arkansas that included a lynching, the Price family moved to Chicago, where Florence studied composition, orchestration, organ, languages and liberal arts at various schools with several of the city’s leading musicians and teachers, and published four pieces for piano soon after settling there. In 1932, Price won First Prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Composition Competition for her Symphony in E minor. The performance of the Symphony on June 15, 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was the first by a major American orchestra of a symphonic work by an African-American woman; the CSO repeated the performance at the Chicago World’s Fair later that year. She continued to compose prolifically — three more symphonies and two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber, piano and organ pieces, songs, spiritual arrangements, jingles for radio commercials — and received numerous performances, including her arrangement of the spiritual My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord that Marian Anderson used to close her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on April 9, 1939. Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3, 1953.

Price was encouraged by Frederick Stock, conductor of the remarkably successful premiere of her Symphony in E minor in June 1933, to write a Piano Concerto and appear as soloist in its first performance. She began the work in October 1933, finished the score the following spring, and gave its premiere on June 24, 1934 at a concert celebrating the 67th commencement of the Chicago Musical College, where Price was then a graduate student, with the school’s orchestra. She scored another success with the Concerto — which, according to a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, “aside from its technical perfections, disclosed thematic substance rich in syncopated and spiritual colors” — and two months later she played the piece in a two-piano arrangement at the annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians in Pittsburgh; it was heard again on October 12, 1934, when her protégé Margaret Bonds was soloist in a performance with the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago at the city’s Century of Progress Exhibition. There were apparently no further performances of the Concerto in its original orchestral form during the composer’s lifetime. The full orchestral score was lost, but the music survived in manuscripts of the solo part with an orchestral reduction, arrangements for two and three pianos, and a partial set of parts for the instruments. Those materials came into the archives of the Center for Black Music Research at Chicago’s Columbia College, which commissioned composer and Drew University professor Trevor Weston to reconstruct the Concerto’s performance materials from them. Pianist Karen Walwyn and conductor Leslie Dunner gave the first performance of Price’s reconstructed Piano Concerto with the Center’s New Black Music Repertory Ensemble on February 17, 2011, and recorded it for Albany Records a month later.

Price’s Piano Concerto is in a single movement divided into three distinct sections — Moderato, Adagio, Allegretto — that approximate the scale and form of the traditional genre. The serious mood of the opening Moderato is established by the wind instruments, which introduce the modally inflected motive that provides much of the thematic material for the first section. A piano cadenza leads to the entry of the full orchestra and further development of the modal motive. The Moderato’s emotional and thematic content are given formal balance by an episode based on a march-like melody in a brighter key, but the stern music soon resumes and leads to a full cadence and a brief pause. After a few transitional phrases in the strings, the poignant, lyrical Adagio begins with a “call” from the oboe followed by a “response” from the piano, recalling a common structure in African-American folk music. The finale is based on the juba, an antebellum folk dance that involves foot-tapping, hand-clapping and thigh-slapping, all in precise rhythm. (Such “body sounds” were unavoidable since slaves were forbidden by their owners from having drums for fear they might be used to send coded signals.) Price said that the rhythmic element in African-American music is of “preeminent importance. In the dance, it is a compelling, onward-sweeping force that tolerates no interruption,” a quality joyously manifested in the closing section of her Piano Concerto.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda