Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. As she said herself, she was double handicapped: music written by women was preconceived by many to be lacking in depth and logic, and she suffered from a second affliction, her race as an African American. Price was actually of mixed racial heritage, African, European and Native American. She made history when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock premiered her award-winning Symphony in E minor in 1933. Critics raved about the premiere and hoped that this would bring about a new era.
Price was celebrated during her time, but she continued to face gender and race barriers and was not accorded a place in the canon of American music history. A large number of her approximately 300 compositions
remained unpublished. In 2009 a cache of her manuscripts was discovered by property developers in the attic of an abandoned house in Illinois. That cache included the present Piano Quintet in A minor, a work which may have been written around 1936, the date of her well-known E-minor quintet. Written in a late-romantic idiom, the piece celebrates African American heritage by echoing the musical language of spirituals and hymns (second movement), and reworking elements of the popular stomping dance that hailed from the slave plantations of the Deep South (third movement). The A minor Quintet was first published in 2017.
Price’s Quintet in A Minor is performed by members of The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA): Tomoko Kashiwagi, acting principal pianist; Zsolt Eder, associate concertmaster; Miho Oda Sakon, principal second violin; Jesse Collett, principal violist; and Kari Caldwell, principal cello. There are four movements.
Women Composers Index