Carnegie Hall

Florence Price (1887–1953) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. A gifted musician who began studying piano at age four, Price was exposed to the music of Bach and Mendelssohn as a child, and her parents frequently hosted leading figures of the Black intelligentsia, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. By age 14, Price had enrolled at New England Conservatory, where she earned degrees in both piano and organ performance. Price relocated to Chicago in 1926 and started to gain national and international recognition for her music. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s premiere of her Symphony in E Minor was the first performance by a major US orchestra of a symphony composed by a Black woman. Price composed more than 300 works, and her musical language synthesizes European traditions with elements of Black spirituals and other folk traditions.