Little Pastorale

Florence Berenice Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, into an ethnically mixed family: her mother was a music teacher, her father a dentist. Her exceptional musical talent became evident early on, and her first compositions were published when she was only eleven years old.

Despite her evident talent, when she enrolled to study music in 1902, Price felt compelled to identify herself as Mexican in order to avoid racial discrimination. From 1903 to 1906 she studied music theory with Frederick Shepherd Converse and George Chadwick and organ with Henry Morton Dunham at the New England Conservatory in Boston. There she impressed the French composer Alexandre Guilmant with a performance of his Organ Sonata No. 1. After completing her studies, she returned to the South, teaching music at several institutions before becoming head of the music department at Atlanta University.

Following her marriage to the lawyer Thomas J. Price, she gave up this position and moved back to Little Rock. Restricted by Jim Crow laws, she was unable to find employment and focused on private teaching and composition. Escalating racial violence, culminating in a lynching in 1927, led the family to join the Great Migration and relocate to Chicago. There, Price continued her studies (among others with Leo Sowerby) and became part of the Chicago Black Renaissance. She formed close artistic ties with figures such as Langston Hughes and Marian Anderson. After her divorce, she supported herself as a silent-film organist and by writing commercial music.

Prices major breakthrough came in 1932, when her First Symphony won the Wanamaker Prize and was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the 1933 World’s Fair—the first orchestral work by an African American woman to be performed by a major symphony orchestra. Over the following two decades, Price composed numerous further orchestral works as well as choral, vocal, chamber, piano, and organ music.

Price died in 1953.