Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement
This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum. https://youtu.be/tZ54dddRI08 Florence Price (1887–1953) was the first Black woman composer to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra. Her Symphony in e minor, which won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards in 1932, received its premiere in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although she won many awards and did have some works published and performed in her lifetime, she still faced discrimination and was unable to get most of her compositions performed. In 1943, she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, “To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on em...