Florence Price
Little Rock
1887 – 1953
Florence Price emerged from Little Rock to become one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century and a historic barrier-breaker in classical music. Her achievement was not simply that she succeeded despite racism and sexism. It was that she created a distinctive American musical language in which European classical forms could live alongside spirituals, blues, Black dance rhythms, and the musical traditions she had known since childhood.
Born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock in 1887, she grew up in an accomplished family that valued education and music. Her mother, a teacher and businesswoman, gave Florence her first piano lessons. The child proved extraordinary. She performed publicly at four, published her first composition at eleven, and graduated as valedictorian from Little Rock’s Capitol Hill School at fourteen.
In 1903, Price entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, one of the nation’s leading music schools and one that admitted students regardless of race. She completed an intensive course of study in only three years, graduating with honors and earning credentials in both organ performance and piano teaching.
Price returned to Arkansas and began teaching, first at Cotton Plant Academy and later at Shorter College in North Little Rock. After several years in Atlanta, she returned to Little Rock in 1912, married attorney Thomas Jewell Price, raised two daughters, taught privately, and continued composing. She submitted music to publishers and entered competitions, slowly building a body of work even when opportunities for a Black woman composer were severely limited.
By the 1920s, worsening racial violence in Little Rock convinced Price to move her family to Chicago. The relocation placed her inside the creative world of the Chicago Black Renaissance, where she continued her studies, composed prolifically, and developed the mature voice that would bring her national recognition.
Her great breakthrough came in 1932, when her Symphony in E Minor won first prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation competition. On June 15, 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the work at the Century of Progress World’s Fair. The performance made Price the first Black woman to have a symphony presented by a major American orchestra.
The achievement was historic, but Price’s career extended far beyond a single first. She wrote more than 300 works, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music, art songs, choral works, and music for solo instruments. Her compositions combined the architecture of classical music with melodies, rhythms, and expressive traditions rooted in African American life. In 1939, Marian Anderson performed Price’s arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” during her landmark Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of 75,000 and millions more listening by radio.
Price remained connected to Arkansas. In 1935, Philander Smith College invited her home for a concert of her compositions at Dunbar High School, where a large Little Rock audience welcomed her as a celebrated returning artist.
After her death in 1953, Price’s music gradually disappeared from concert programs. Then, in 2009, a remarkable discovery in an abandoned Illinois house once used by Price revealed manuscripts and papers thought lost. The materials were ultimately donated to the University of Arkansas, helping fuel a major international revival of interest in her work.
Today, Florence Price is no longer treated as a forgotten historical curiosity. Her symphonies and other compositions are performed and recorded by leading orchestras and musicians, and her place in American music continues to grow. The young prodigy formed in Little Rock became a composer whose work expanded both the sound of American classical music and the possibilities of who could claim a place within it.