Following her death in 1953, much of her work was overshadowed as new musical styles emerged that fit the changing tastes of modern society. Some of her work was lost, but as more African-American and female composers gained attention for their works, so has Price. In 2001, the Women's Philharmonic created an album of some of her work. In 2011, pianist Karen Walwyn and The New Black Repertory Ensemble performed Price's Concerto in One Movement and Symphony in E minor. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in an abandoned dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, which Price had used as a summer home. These consisted of dozens of her scores, including her two violin concertos and her fourth symphony. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.
Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 1887 – June 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in her abandoned summer home. Despite racial issues of the era, her family was well respected within their local community. She gave her first piano performance at the age of four and had her first composition published at the age of 11. After high school, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Initially, she passed herself off as Mexican to avoid the racial discrimination against African Americans, listing her hometown as Pueblo, Mexico. At the Conservatory, she studied composition and counterpoint with composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse Also while there, Smith wrote her first string trio and symphony. She graduated in 1906 with honours, and with both an artist diploma in organ and a piano teaching certificate. In 1910, she returned to Arkansas, where she taught briefly and then moved to Atlanta, Georgia. There she became the head of the music department of what is now Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer. She gave up her teaching position and moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had his practice and had two daughters. She could not find work in the by now racially segregated town. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching of a Black man in 1927, the Price family decided to leave. Like many Black families living in the Deep South, they moved north in the Great Migration to escape the Jim Crow conditions, and settled in Chicago. According to her daughter, Florence really wanted to be a doctor but felt the difficulties of becoming a woman doctor at the time were too formidable. Instead, she became that even greater rarity a woman composer of symphonies. In Chicago, Florence Price began a new and fulfilling period in her composition career; she was part of the Chicago Black Renaissance. She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city, as well as studying languages and liberal arts subjects.
