TICKETS

Florence Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 9 April 1887. She began learning music from her mother at an early age and gave her first piano performance at age four, reportedly publishing a composition (now lost) at age eleven. She graduated high school at the age of sixteen and in that same year was accepted into the New England Conservatory (Boston), then as now one of the most prestigious musical academies in the U.S.

Although the premiere of her First Symphony brought instant recognition and fame to Florence Beatrice Price, success as a composer was not to be hers. She would “continue to wage an uphill battle – a battle much larger than any war that pure talent and musical skill could win. It was a battle in which the nation was embroiled – a dangerous mélange of segregation, Jim Crow laws, entrenched racism, and sexism.” (Women’s Voices for Change, March 8, 2013). The same fate would also befall fellow Arkansan William Grant Still, the “Dean of Black Composers” (whose Afro-American Symphony was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic Symphony under Howard Hanson, the first time in history that a major American orchestra had played a symphonic work by a black composer) and many others due to rampant endemic and systemic racism.