In early-20th-century America, orchestral music was largely regarded as the province of dead white men, a field in which a living Black woman had no apparent hope of gaining any foothold. This makes Florence Price’s career all the more unlikely, and therefore more remarkable. Price faced the unrelenting double challenge of racism and gender bias her entire life. Nevertheless, she persisted and earned a crucial place in American music history that is still in the process of being fully recognized and celebrated.

Price was born into an upper-middle-class mixed-race family in Arkansas. Her mother, a music teacher, provided her first musical training. Graduating at the top of her high school class, Price was accepted into the New England Conservatory of Music to study piano and organ, but won admittance only by “passing” as Mexican, in order to avoid the heightened racial bias against African Americans. After graduating in 1906, she taught at colleges in Arkansas and Georgia before moving to Chicago in 1927 to escape racially motivated violence and segregation. Once in Illinois, she continued her education with the leading music teachers in the Chicago area.  

In 1932 Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor won a Wanamaker Foundation Award and was performed the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—the first time a major orchestra had performed a work by a Black American woman. The conductor on that occasion was Frederick Stock—one of only a handful of conductors in America at the time willing to program Price’s orchestral music. It was Stock who then encouraged her to write a piano concerto.  

Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement was premiered in Chicago in 1934, with the composer as soloist and Stock conducting. It was dedicated to Helen Armstrong Andrews, Price’s patron and friend. Other performances followed soon after, eliciting almost universal critical acclaim. One reviewer wrote in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, “There [in the Concerto] is real American music, and Mrs. Price is speaking a language she knows,” acknowledging both the Concerto’s technical assuredness and its musical roots in African-American tradition.

After her death in 1953, Price and almost all her 300 compositions (including about 100 songs) faded into obscurity. Several decades later, scholars including Barbara Garvey Jackson, Helen Walker-Hill, and Rae Linda Brown started researching her career and music, and her compositions also gradually began to appear on concert programs again. A collection of Price’s scores and papers were miraculously discovered in a derelict house outside St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009—it had been Price’s summer home near the end of her life. Further fueled by this unexpected discovery, the simmering Price revival gathered momentum, and in 2018 the publishing house of G. Schirmer acquired the rights to her entire catalog. 

In 2015 the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago commissioned Trevor Weston, a composition professor at Drew University, to reconstruct the orchestration of Price’s Piano Concerto. Although the original orchestral score had been lost for several decades, some of the orchestral parts were discovered in the early 1990s, and Price had left a piano rehearsal score, plus a two-piano reduction of the Concerto, annotated with some of her ideas on orchestration. Weston reconstructed the missing orchestral parts, and his orchestration premiered in 2016.  

Then, two years later, the original manuscript copy turned up unexpectedly at an auction in the same Illinois town, St. Anne, where so many of Price’s other scores had been recently rediscovered. Schirmer quickly readied the publication of the Concerto’s original orchestration, which was then released in 2020. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Digital Stage concert this past February with soloist Michelle Cann marked the first North American performance of the Piano Concerto in its original orchestration at least since Price’s death in 1953, and possibly since the mid-1930s.

As its name suggests, the Piano Concerto in One Movement is played without a break, but with three sections corresponding to the three traditional movements of a Classical piano concerto. A sparse introduction, presenting the first section’s main theme, leads quickly into an extended piano cadenza. Then the theme—an original melody in which Price draws on the flavor of the spiritual—develops into a propulsive, energetic quasi-sonata form. The slower central section is a lyrical Adagio whose melody suggests the nostalgic, yearning quality of African-American “sorrow songs” such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” or “Deep River.” Call-and-response exchanges within the orchestra confirm the allusion.

Price believed the “juba”—a lively, syncopated plantation dance that predates the Civil War—was as essential to African-American music as the spiritual. She included a “juba” (although not always named as such in the score) in every one of her larger works. The final section in this Concerto is a rollicking, exultant “juba” whose lively rhythms clearly underscore how integral that dance form was to the development of ragtime.  

—Luke Howard

Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, Eleonora M. Beck, Patrick Castillo, and/or Luke Howard.