Florence Price

Symphony No.3 in C minor

Florence Price, the first Black female American composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, 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 More than 50 years later, in 2009, a large collection of scores and unpublished works by Price were discovered in a house in rural Illinois.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 piano 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, and he believed, as did Antonín Dvořák before him, that American composers should incorporate the rich traditions of American vernacular music into their own work, rather than trying to imitate European styles.

Price, already inclined in this direction, was encouraged by Chadwick; many of her works reflect the expressive, distinctive idioms of what were then referred to as “Negro” traditions: spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and folkdance rhythms whose origins trace back to Africa. In 1938, 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’s later works, including the Symphony No. 3, fuse these uniquely Black American musical idioms with the modernist European language employed by many classical composers of the day. Price explained, “[The Symphony No. 3 is] a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day,” specifically, her use of the expressively dissonant harmonic language of the 20th century.

Each of the Third Symphony’s four movements juxtaposes elements of both musical traditions, often in opposition to one another. The Andante; Allegro opens with a slow, pensive introduction in which brasses and winds feature prominently. This gives way to the Allegro’s restless, harmonically unsettled first theme. A solo trombone introduces a contrasting second section, featuring original melodies grounded in the Black vernacular tradition. The pastoral quality of the Andante ma non troppo evokes the warm serenity of a summer afternoon, while the Juba, an African dance brought to America by enslaved people, transmits its infectious ebullience through syncopated rhythms and specific percussion accents, particularly the castanets and xylophone. The closing Scherzo combines Black-inflected rhythms and 20th-century harmonies in an orchestral showcase full of virtuosic passages.

© Elizabeth Schwartz

NOTE: These program notes are published here by the Modesto Symphony Orchestra for its patrons and other interested readers. Any other use is forbidden without specific permission from the author, who may be contacted at www.classicalmusicprogramnotes.com