NVYO March 8th concert: Meet Florence Price

As an American composer in the early 20th century, Florence Price had the double disadvantage of being both African-American and a woman. Either of those distinctions made it very difficult to have been performed in America in the 1930s. Born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1887 to a mixed-race family, Price was a talented pianist from a young age. She enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music at 14, where she studied composition and graduated in 1907. She died unexpectedly in 1963, and then in 2009, a substantial number of her works were found in an abandoned house. Though the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor in 1932 giving it national fame, she is still only beginning to receive the recognition that she deserves. Price’s compositions offer a charming and authentic blend of jazz, spirituals, African-American church music and European art music.