Florence Beatrice Price, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, was a pioneer black American composer who distinguished herself early on. Most notably, she is remembered as the first black American woman to garner success as a composer of symphonic music. Her first symphony is perhaps her best-known work. Winner of the prestigious Wannamaker Competition prize in 1932, it was given its world première in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—a social and cultural milestone in this country at that time.
At a young age she journeyed north to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory, and returned to Arkansas and Georgia to teach at various small black colleges. After marriage she and her husband left a racially troubled Arkansas in 1927 for Chicago and her further study at the American Conservatory of Music with Leo Sowerby. Her career blossomed, and recognition for her art led to the afore-mentioned symphony in 1931, followed by two more symphonies, concertos, and other works for orchestra. She composed prolifically in a variety of other genres: chamber works, piano music, and vocal compositions–over three hundred in all. Her many songs and arrangements of spirituals were perhaps her most performed compositions. Sadly, while she enjoyed publication of many of her songs and piano works beginning in the late 1920s, most of the major works of her œuvre remained in manuscript during her lifetime. However, with her increasing popularity today, that situation is rapidly changing. Since 1987, over two dozen recordings of her works have been released, including those by eminent symphony orchestras.
Price wrote four concertos: two for violin and orchestra, and two for piano and orchestra. The first one, the Piano Concerto in One Movement, was written soon after her success with the première of her first symphony with the Chicago Symphony. With the support and encouragement of Chicago’s longtime conductor, Frederick Stock, she composed the concerto for the next season. She was featured as the soloist in its première in 1934 at the June commencement program of the Chicago Musical College.
While the concerto was performed frequently in ensuing years, by World War II, like so many of her works, it then lapsed into obscurity, and was feared lost. Today, the music world is immeasurably enriched by the fortuitous discovery in 2009 of more-or-less the mother lode of her music manuscripts, in what had been Price’s summer home near the tiny village of St. Anne, Illinois, near Kankakee. Price had used the house as a seasonal residence, but years of neglect had left it in ruin. Renovators found the manuscripts, many strewn all over the floor—a trove that was close to permanent loss had their value not been recognized.
The Piano Concerto in One Movement, alternately known as Concerto in D Minor, though in a single movement, clearly has three major sections, each corresponding to the three movements of a traditional concerto. While therein many commentators seem to find important elements of Price’s deep engagement with African-American musical traditions—and indeed, many of her compositions are steeped in them–in the andantino first section, that is nonsense. If anything, the first section is firmly ensconced in European Late-Romanticism and its virtuoso piano textures. Her European models are clear, and yet she is not a slavish imitator of them. For her musical imagination surfaces to tweak traditions in creative and nuanced ways.
The first section begins softly in the brass and woodwinds, with the main theme heard immediately in the solo trumpet, echoed by other winds. With the main idea established, we are then totally surprised by the solo piano in nothing less than an extensive, dynamic cadenza in the best tradition of the legendary Franz Liszt. It’s as if the composer was throwing down the gauntlet to establish her bona fides as a serious composer in the great traditions of the piano. The chromaticism in the welter of dazzling virtuoso textures in the cadenza is a harbinger of things to come in the first section.
When the soloist finishes, the orchestra takes up the initial theme and works through it in familiar ways, until the piano joins by largely providing a filigree accompaniment. And, like putting a cadenza at the opening rather than the end, Price tweaks tradition by keeping the related second ideas firmly in the same opening key of D minor. The following twitchy, energetic development tends toward chromatic new textures than in “developing” familiar themes. It ends with yet another surprise: a brand new, magisterial march in the rather unusual key of Bb major—of which, more later. The recap is clear, with the opening idea appearing softly, as before, in the woodwinds. Driven by cascades of chromatic scales in the piano, the section soon ends with a quick statement of the familiar theme.
The adagio cantabile second section is largely a blissfully gentle meditation by the piano, exploring the traditional pentatonic scales and harmonies that are intrinsic to Black spirituals. Here Price at her best in utilizing these traditional elements subtly, integrating them into a larger style. Most of the section is a dialogue between the solo oboe and piano, with the rest of the orchestra appearing only from time to time. The whole is a pensive arabesque that displays Price’s impressive command of orchestra color.
Finally, in the last section, Price treats us to a joyful, snappy traditional African-American dance. Rather than conventionally ending a “Concerto in D Minor” in that key, Price ignored convention, and chose the key of Bb,which we heard in the first section. The scintillating dance is a juba, which, in its “jiving” syncopations sounds rather like ragtime. The juba was an antebellum slave dance brought to the South from the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day Angola). Since fearful plantation owners had taken away the African drums with their powerful symbolism, the enslaved people resorted to using their bodies for musical expression. And the patting, jumping, and stomping was infectious, indeed. And, as Price’s last section proves—it still is.
The Piano Concerto in One Movement is a work that displays the broad array of Price’s musical talents. She was the mistress of both the European Romantic traditions and those of her own ethnic culture. Few integrated those perspectives with as much mastery and nuance as she. The music critic Alex Ross perhaps said it best: “Listening to her, I have the uncanny sense of hearing the symphonies and operas that women and African-Americans were all but barred from writing during the Romantic heyday . . . . She seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals.”
Wm. E. Runyan
©William E. Runyan 2026