Florence Price
| Florence Beatrice Price | |
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| Born |
April 9, 1887 Little Rock, Arkansas, USA |
| Died | June 3, 1953 Chicago, Illinois, USA |
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Florence Beatrice Price (April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an African-American classical composer. She was the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra.
Price was born to Florence Gulliver and James H. Smith on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Price was one of three children in a mixed-race family. Despite racial issues of the era, Price's family was well respected and did well within their community. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. Price had her first piano performance at the age of four and went on to have her first composition published at the age of 11.
By the time she was 14, Price had graduated from Capitol High School at the top of her class and was enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music with a major in piano and organ. Initially, Price pretended to be Mexican to avoid the prejudice people had toward African-Americans at the time. At the Conservatory, Price was able to study composition and counterpoint with composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. Also while there, she wrote her first string trio and symphony. She graduated in 1906 with honors and both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.
Price taught in Arkansas briefly before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910, where she became the head of Clark University's music department. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer, and moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching in 1927, the family moved to Chicago, where Price began a new and fulfilling period in her compositional career. She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city including Arthur Olaf Anderson, Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette, and Leo Sowerby, and published four pieces for piano in 1928. While in Chicago, Price was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher’s College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music.
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