Florence Price
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Florence Beatrice Price (1888-1953) was an American composer.
Florence Price is considered the first black woman in the United States to win recognition as a composer. Her parents, both artistic, carefully guided her early musical training, and at age fourteen, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music with a major in piano and organ. She studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, writing her first string trio and symphony in college, and graduating in 1907 with honors and an artist diploma and a teaching certificate.
She taught in Arkansas from 1907-1927 and married Thomas J. Price, an attorney, in 1912. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, the family moved to Chicago where Price began a new and fulfilling period in her compositional career. She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city and published four pieces for piano in 1928.
Her friendship with the young composer, Margaret Bonds, resulted in a teacher-student relationship and the two women began to achieve national recognition for their compositions and performances. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, premiered her Symphony In E Minor on June 15, 1933. Price wrote other extended works for orchestra, chamber works, art songs, works for violin, organ anthems, piano pieces, and spiritual arrangements. Some of her more popular works are: Three Little Negro Dances, Songs to a Dark Virgin, My Soul's Been Anchored in de Lord, and Moon Bridge.
Source: Perkins Holly, Ellistine. Biographies of Black Composers and Songwriters; A Supplementary Textbook. Iowa:Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1990.
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