The first Black woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra — then nearly lost in an abandoned house.
In June 1933, at the Century of Progress world's fair, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock played a new Symphony in E minor. It opened with a melody that sounded like a spiritual and had a juba dance where a scherzo should be. Its composer was a 46-year-old Black woman from Little Rock who had left an abusive marriage two years before and had been paying the bills by playing organ for silent films. It was the first time a major American orchestra had played music by an African-American woman.
Florence Price wrote more than 300 works: symphonies, concertos, art songs, and spiritual arrangements that Marian Anderson sang in concert. Then she died, styles changed, and her music went quiet. In 2009 a couple renovating a derelict house outside St. Anne, Illinois, found boxes of her scores inside, among them two violin concertos and her Fourth Symphony.
A life in four cities
The lifeline
1887
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to a dentist and a music teacher
1906
Graduates with honors from the New England Conservatory, Boston
1927
After a lynching in Little Rock, the family moves north to Chicago
1933
The Chicago Symphony plays her Symphony in E minor
1940
Becomes the first Black woman admitted to ASCAP
1953
Dies of a stroke in Chicago, aged 66
By the numbers
The measure of her
300+
Works: four symphonies, four concertos, songs, spirituals, organ and piano music
11
Her age when her first composition was published
$500
Her Wanamaker prize in 1932: first place for the symphony, third for a piano sonata
56
Years between her death and the 2009 rescue of her scores from a derelict house
What she wrote
The work
1906
A first symphony and string trio, written as a student of George Chadwick in Boston. She had enrolled at 16, giving her hometown as "Pueblo, Mexico" to avoid prejudice. The symphony is lost.
1932
Symphony No. 1 in E minor. It won the Wanamaker Foundation's first prize and was played by the Chicago Symphony the next year. It draws on spirituals and the juba, a plantation dance.
1934
Piano Concerto in One Movement. She played the solo part herself at the Chicago Musical College commencement, then again for the National Association of Negro Musicians in Pittsburgh.
1939
"My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord." Marian Anderson sang Price's arrangement at the Lincoln Memorial concert that Easter, in front of a crowd of about 75,000.
1940
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, first performed in 1940 by the WPA Symphony Orchestra in Detroit, one of several of her orchestral works that New Deal orchestras played.
1945–52
Symphony No. 4 and Violin Concerto No. 2. Both were unperformed when she died. Both were among the scores found at St. Anne in 2009.
Nearly erased, then restored
Recognition
In her lifetime
Could not find work as a teacher in segregated Little Rock
Played organ for silent films and wrote radio jingles under a pen name to pay the bills
Her 1943 letter asking Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony to look at her scores led to no performance
After 1953 her music went largely unplayed, and her papers sat in a house that was left to decay
Today
Her scores were rescued at St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009, and G. Schirmer took on her whole catalog in 2018
The Philadelphia Orchestra's recording of Symphonies 1 and 3 won a Grammy in 2022
In 2025 a crater on Mercury was named for her, and an album of her unpublished songs won a Grammy
An opera about her life, My Name is Florence, premiered in St. Paul in 2026
The place that made her
Chicago's South Side
She came north in 1927, one of hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners in the Great Migration, and found a home in the Chicago Black Renaissance. She took lessons from the city's best teachers, lived for a while with her student Margaret Bonds, and through her met Langston Hughes and Marian Anderson.
1927
The year she left Jim Crow Arkansas for Chicago
1933
The year the Century of Progress fair gave her symphony its premiere
1964
Chicago opens the Florence B. Price Elementary School in Kenwood
"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."
— Florence Price, letter to Serge Koussevitzky, 1943
