Page 19 - Phil 2024-2025 opening night digital program

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~ The following program notes by Laura Stanfield Prichard ~

Violin Concerto No. 1 Florence Price
(1887-1953)

The Violin Concerto No. 1 by Florence Price was composed in 1939 and first recorded
by Er-Gene Kahng at the University of Arkansas in 2018. Price sprinkles references to
Tchaikovsky’s concerto throughout: note the opening of the first solo entrance, the big
vibrant cadenza, and the coda of the first movement, which is lyrical and rhythmically
virtuosic, and it’s very American. The gorgeous second movement begins in B-flat major,
evoking a calm southern evening. The concerto concludes jaunty American scherzo in
6/8. Tonight’s performance is being played from a brand new publication by G. Schirmer,
based on sketches and parts found recently in northern Illinois and on a manuscript
held by Price’s archive at the University of Arkansas.

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.”

Price’s life and work has been explored in the Emmy-nominated DVD: The Caged Bird:
The Life and Music of Florence Price (2015), articles in The New York Times and The New
Yorker on recent rediscoveries of many long-lost manuscripts (caches found in 2009 and
2019), and Rae Linda Brown’s excellent new biography (The Heart of a Woman, Illinois,
2020).

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S eason 20 2 4/25 17
Season 2024/25