On Thursday, November 20 (10:00 am at KCH), the Guild welcomes Dr. Lia Jensen-Abbott from Albion College for a presentation entitled: Expressive Meaning in Florence Price’s Piano Sonata and Teaching Pieces. The talk will feature a full performance of Price’s impressive Sonata in E Minor in addition to a discussion of this and other works by the composer.
As with so much else, it has taken far too long for women to find acceptance as composers. For those born before the Twentieth Century, even the most accomplished – from Barbara Strozzi to Fanny Mendelssohn, Louise Reichardt to Cécile Chaminade – cultural expectations or gender stereotyping left them struggling to find a wide audience or to achieve the success and respect more easily attained by men. Rebecca Clarke, considered by some contemporaries to be among the most important English composers after WWI, often found it difficult to write due to the discouraging atmosphere for female artists. Likely this was the case for too many, and we should conclude that among even those women who have found some long-overdue respect (Clara Schumann, for instance), many could have developed into far-greater composers given encouragement and an equal playing field. And though the picture has changed drastically today, the lessons of this history must be continually relearned.
The career of Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953), shows signs of considerable progress, even as it illustrates the struggle. Gifted enough to enroll at the New England Conservatory of Music by the age of fourteen, she studied piano, organ and composition, writing her first string trio and symphony before graduating with honors in 1907. Returning to her native Arkansas after college, however, Price found little support as a composer. Despite her credentials, she was denied membership into the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association because of her race (another, perhaps greater struggle to overcome!). Price, instead, established a music studio, taught piano lessons, and wrote mostly short, teaching pieces for piano. For nearly twenty years she maintained this career until racial tensions in Arkansas began to boil over in the 1920s.
Price and her husband escaped north to Chicago, Illinois in 1927. It was here that she finally found the success she deserved, not only by establishing a new teaching studio, but through the publication of her music. In 1928, none other than G. Schirmer accepted Price’s At the Cotton Gin, a characteristic work mixing her strong training in European classicism with the sounds of her African-American roots in the American South. In 1932, her success was cemented by winning multiple awards sponsored by the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation for the Piano Sonata in E Minor and Symphony in E Minor. With the symphony, she became the first African-American woman to see a symphony presented by a major orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the work on June 15, 1933. This and other works by Price would be heard across the Northeast, premiered by the orchestras of New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and others.
In 1939, when contralto Marian Anderson gave her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial (an open-air concert necessitated as Anderson was denied a concert venue based on her race!), she concluded with Price’s “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” Ever since, Price’s many art songs and spiritual settings have been among the most frequently heard of her works. Some of this feeling imbues the piano sonata – particularly the richly lyrical second, Andante, movement.
Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3. She wrote more than 300 musical compositions. Some of her works have been lost, others are unpublished (though kept by and accessible through the University of Arkansas, Special Collections).