Florence Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9, 1887, and died in Chicago, Illinois, on June 3, 1953. The Octet is scored for two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, and piano. Approximate performance time is twelve minutes.

Price studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory, where she earned an artist’s degree in organ, and a teacher’s diploma in piano. After graduation, Price taught music at various institutions in Little Rock and Atlanta. In 1927, Florence Beatrice Price moved to Chicago. There, Price earned recognition for her talents as a composer and concert pianist. 

In 1932, Price entered a composition competition sponsored by the National Association of Negro Musicians. Two of her works earned prizes. The Symphony in E minor won first place, and the tone poem Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, received honorable mention. In 1933, Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the Symphony in E minor as part of the city’s Century of Progress International Exposition. 

This was the first time a major American orchestra had presented an orchestral work by a female African American composer. Numerous performances of Price’s music, both in the United States and abroad, soon followed.

Florence Price is best known for her art songs and arrangements of spirituals, performed by such artists as Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price. But her more than 300 compositions span a wide variety of instrumental and vocal genres. After Price’s death in 1953, her daughter, Florence Price Robinson, took possession of her mother’s scores, most of them unpublished. 

When Robinson died in 1975, it seemed the music was lost. But in 2009, property renovators discovered the scores in an abandoned house. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville acquired the works, and eventually made them available to the public. Included among those scores is Price’s Octet for Brasses and Piano.

The Octet is in three brief movements. The first two (Tempo moderato, Andante cantabile) favor a lyrical mode of expression. The more lively finale (Tempo moderato) embodies the fusion of classical and jazz/blues traditions so characteristic of Price’s music.