Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 9, 1887/88 – June 3, 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.
Biography Early life and education Florence Beatrice Smith was born to Florence (Gulliver) and James H. Smith on April 9, 1887 or 1888, in Little Rock, Arkansas,Slonimsky (1994) gives 1888. one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her father was the only African-American dentist in the city, and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. Despite racial issues of the era, her family was well respected and did well within their community. She took piano lessons from her mother at the age of three and gave her first piano performance at the age of four; her first composition is published at the age of 11.
She attended school at a Catholic convent, and in 1901, at age 14, she graduated as valedictorian of her class. In 1903, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, with a double major in piano pedagogy and organ performance. Initially, she passed as Mexican to avoid 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 honors, and with both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate.Slonimsky and biography.com agree on 1906.
Career In 1910, Smith returned to Arkansas, where she taught briefly before moving to Atlanta, Georgia. There she became the head of the music department of Clark University, a historically Black college which is now called “Clark Atlanta University”. 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 what was, by then, a 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 Jim Crow conditions, and settled in Chicago, a major industrial city.
There 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, including Arthur Olaf Andersen, Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette, and Leo Sowerby. She published four pieces for piano in 1928. While in Chicago, Price was at various times enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, Chicago Teacher's College, University of Chicago, and American Conservatory of Music, studying languages and liberal arts subjects as well as music.
In 1930, an important early success occurred at the twelfth annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), when pianist-composer Margaret Bonds premiered Price's Fantasie nègre [No. 1] (1929) in its original version titled "Negro Fantasy". Of this performance, Carl Ditton wrote for the Associated Negro Press: The surprise of the evening was a most effective composition by Mrs. F. B. Price, entitled 'A Negro Phantasy', played by the talented Chicago pianiste, Margaret Bonds. The entire association [i.e., NANM] could well afford to recommend this number to all advanced pianists.*The Pittsburgh Courier* (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) 6 September 1930.
In 1931, financial struggles and abuse by her husband resulted in Price getting a divorce at age 44. She became a single mother to her two daughters. To make ends meet, she worked as an organist for silent film screenings and composed songs for radio ads under a pen name. During this time, Price lived with friends. She eventually moved in with her student and friend, Margaret Bonds, also a Black pianist and composer. This friendship connected Price with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the art world who aided in Price's future success as a composer. Together, Price and Bonds began to achieve national recognition for their compositions and performances.
In 1932, both Price and Bonds submitted compositions for the Wanamaker Foundation Awards. Price won first prize with her Symphony in E minor, and third for her Piano Sonata, earning her a $500 prize. (Bonds came in first place in the song category, with a song entitled "Sea Ghost".) Early in 1933 leading Arts advocate Maude Roberts George, president of the Chicago Music Association, music critic of The Chicago Defender and eventual national president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, paid $250 (about $5,093 in 2021 dollars) for Price's First Symphony to be included in a program devoted to "The Negro in Music", with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, as part of the Century of Progress World's Fair.See "Program Notes on Florence B. Price for Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 'Rivers' Series by Barbara Wright-Pryor, President, Chicago Music Association, NANM, Inc.". John Malveaux Music. Although this concert, like the Fair in general, was unmistakably tainted by the racism that characterized Chicago and the U.S. in general in the 1930s,See John Michael Cooper, "The Problem with Programs: Florence Price’s First Symphony, the 1933–34 World’s Fair, and Three Tribbles, Part 1, Part 2 , and Part 3 George's underwriting made Price the first African-American woman to have her music played by a major U.S. orchestra. Later in that same season the Illinois Host House of the World's Fair devoted an entire program to Price and her music, a striking invitation given that Price had adopted Illinois as her home state only five years earlier.
In 1934, Price represented her class at the Chicago Musical College, performing her Concerto in D minor for Piano and Orchestra as part of the 1934 commencement program. This performance was met with critical acclaim. She would go on to perform this Concerto at the National Association of Negro Musicians in Pittsburgh, gaining further critical praise from The Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph. The Telegraph specifically praised Price's blending of her African American culture into her work, calling it "real American music."
During the 1930s, a number of Price's other orchestral works were played by the Works Progress Administration Symphony Orchestra of Detroit and the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago. On October 12, 1934, the Women's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago, a well known orchestra which uplifted women composers and performers, performed the Concerto. This began a long term association between the orchestra and Price. This partnership helped Price to gain recognition, and her Concerto in D minor would go on to be performed by other major symphonies within her lifetime, including the Chicago symphony and the Michigan Works Progress Administration Orchestra.
In 1940, Price was the first African-American woman inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for her work as a composer, a process that took six years since she contacted composer John Alden Carpenter about the requirements for becoming a member of ASCAP.
In 1949, Price published two of her spiritual arrangements, "I Am Bound for the Kingdom", and "I'm Workin' on My Buildin, and dedicated them to Marian Anderson, who performed them on a regular basis.
Personal life In 1912, Price married prominent Arkansas attorney Thomas J. Price (also known as John Gray Lucas) upon returning to Arkansas from Atlanta. Together, they had two daughters and a son: Florence (d. 1975), Edith (d. 1963), and Thomas Jr (d. 1920). The Price children were raised in Chicago.
Florence Price divorced Thomas Price in January 1931, and on February 14, 1931, she married the widower Pusey Dell Arnett (1875–1957), an insurance agent and former baseball player for the Chicago Unions some thirteen years her senior. She and Arnett were separated by April 1934; they apparently never divorced.See Rae Linda Brown, "Lifting the Veil: The Symphonies of Florence B. Price", in Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, ed. Rae Linda Brown and Wayne Shirley, Recent Researches in American Music, No. 66 [Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 2008], xxxi,
On June 3, 1953, Price died from a stroke in Chicago, Illinois, at the age of 66.
Legacy and honors
In 1964, the Chicago Public Schools opened Florence B. Price Elementary School (also known as Price Lit & Writing Elementary School) at 4351 South Drexel Boulevard in the North Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois in her honor. Price Elementary's student body was predominately African-American. The school operated from 1964 until the school district decided to phase it out in 2011 due to poor academic performance, which ultimately led to its closing in 2013. The school housed a piano owned by Price. The school building currently houses a local church as of 2019. In February 2019, The University of Arkansas Honors College held a concert honoring Price. In October 2019, the International Florence Price Festival announced that its inaugural gathering celebrating Price's music and legacy would take place at the University of Maryland School of Music in August 2020. From January 4 to 8, 2021, Price was the BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week.
Following her death, much of her work was overshadowed as new musical styles emerged that fit the changing tastes of modern society. According to some critics, Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, represented a pivotal moment in American classical music, breaking the race barrier for African American composers in major symphonic venues. Price’s achievement paved the way for greater representation, acceptance, and visibility of African American artistry within the classical music tradition, expanding opportunities for artists who had previously faced systemic exclusion from mainstream orchestras and concert halls.'Black History Month: The Musical Legacy of Florence Price', McGraw Hill Education, 2 February 2024
Some of her work was lost, but as more African-American and female composers gained attention for their works, so did 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 February 2025, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in her honor. In that same month, pianist Michelle Cann and soprano Karen Slack won best classical solo vocal album at the 2025 Grammys for their recording Beyond The Years: Unpublished Songs Of Florence Price.
On January 31, 2026, My Name is Florence, had its world premiere in St. Paul, Minnesota. A Minnesota Opera New Works Initiative production, it is a collaboration between librettist Harrison David Rivers and composer B.E. Boykin. It "presents vignettes from Price’s life that bring into focus the impact of family, legacy, and the transformative power of a seat at the piano."
Discovery of manuscripts in 2009