09/12/2026
Hear Florence Price’s tone essay “The Oak” at our October 17 concert at the Hylton Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available now at hyltoncenter.org
In 1933, an orchestra in Chicago began playing a symphony that almost no one in the audience could have understood was making history. The composer was Florence Price, a Black woman born in Arkansas in 1887, and her Symphony No. 1 in E minor was being performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was the first known symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.
Price had reached that stage carrying burdens her white male contemporaries did not. She had studied at the New England Conservatory, sometimes presenting herself as Mexican to navigate the racial barriers surrounding her. Later, racial violence helped drive her family from Arkansas to Chicago. There, after her marriage collapsed, she supported her daughters while composing, teaching music and taking whatever musical work she could find.
Then came the breakthrough.
Her first symphony won the prestigious Wanamaker competition in 1932. The following year, conductor Frederick Stock brought it to the Chicago Symphony. Price took the European symphonic tradition and made room inside it for Black American musical language, including spirituals, African American rhythms and the juba dance.
Yet recognition did not erase prejudice. In 1943, Price wrote to conductor Serge Koussevitzky with painful clarity: “I have two handicaps, those of s*x and race.”
She kept composing anyway.
When Price died in 1953, much of her enormous body of work gradually slipped from view. Then, in 2009, a couple renovating an abandoned house in Illinois discovered boxes of her manuscripts and papers inside.
Dozens of scores thought lost were suddenly back in the world.
Florence Price had spent her life fighting to be heard. More than half a century after her death, her music was waiting in an old house for someone to listen again.
