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Program Notes

More than any other program I can recall, tonight’s concert is designed to make you feel things
intently. From the jazzy hustle-n’-bustle of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, to Rachmaninoff’s
passionate, over-the-top-powerful Second Symphony, your imagination will soar and your
heart will take flight! Add to this sonic menu some newly-discovered and important music by
Florence Price and you have a program exceedingly worthy of your time and the start to our
orchestra’s 107th season. Enjoy!
-- Steven Karidoyanes

The following program notes are by Laura Stanfield Prichard, © 2022

Colonial Dance Florence Price
(1887 — 1953)

Florence Beatrice Smith Price was a notable composer and pianist based in Chicago
from 1927-1953. Her Piano Concerto was featured at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and
Marian Anderson performed her spiritual arrangements. She composed over 300 works,
concentrating on the piano, voice, and orchestra.
A New England Conservatory graduate (1906, piano and composition), Price began
publishing compositions in her teens, under the guidance of her mother (Florence Irene
Gulliver Smith, a well-respected pianist and teacher) and Oberlin grad Charlotte Andrews
Stephens. Her father, James H. Smith (b. 1843), was one of the first Black dentists: after
losing his Chicago business in the Great Fire of 1871, he established a practice in (somewhat)
racially-integrated Little Rock, Arkansas. Frequent guests in their home included Langston
Hughes, John Boone, and Frederick and Helen Douglass.

Price and her childhood neighbor William Grant Still (1895-1978) were the earliest African
American composers to have their works championed by major American orchestras.
While completing her degree in Boston, NEC professor George Chadwick encouraged
her to draw on authentic southern spirituals, work songs, and hymns when crafting larger
concert works. While mining this music for its unique, syncopated approach to rhythm,
she taught at several colleges in Arkansas and at Clark University in Atlanta (1910-1912),
writing, “In all types of Negro music, rhythm is of preeminent importance. In the dance, it
is a compelling, onward-sweeping force that tolerates no interruption... All phases of truly
Negro activity—whether work or play, singing or praying—are more than apt to take on a
rhythmic quality.”
Colonial Dance, a vibrant triple-time orchestral showpiece, is being played tonight from
a brand-new publication by G. Schirmer, based on sketches and parts found recently in
northern Illinois and on a manuscript held by her archive at the University of Arkansas.

PAGE 12 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra