The First Symphony has been recorded previously, for Albany, not quite as well as here, but the Fourth is a world premiere.
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Her slow movements, though, are lovely, and while the First Symphony follows the conventional order of movements, with a “Juba Dance” replacing the third movement scherzo, in the Fourth Symphony the finale actually is a scherzo, preceded by another “Juba Dance.” All of this is to say that there’s both thought and originality here despite her discomfort with symphonic form, and you will have to decide if it’s enough to compensate for those long, stiff opening movements. These are an uncomfortable patchwork of disconnected ideas, repetitiously restated, especially in the Fourth Symphony. Price sounds most comfortable when she gets away from the strictures of sonata form–that is, her first movements. That said, she wasn’t much of a symphonist. Her idiom, as the notes suggest, mixes Gershwin with Ellington, and I would add Dvorák and Vaughan-Williams (for the recourse to modal harmony), not that she had any of those composers in mind necessarily. For a review of her Third Symphony and other orchestral pieces, click here. Price, who studied at the New England Conservatory, composed four symphonies in all, three of which survive, and much other music besides. Price died in Chicago in 1953 leaving a vast legacy of orchestral, choral, vocal, chamber, spirituals, piano, and organ work.Florence Price (1887-1953) was the first African-American woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra (the Chicago Symphony in 1933). In 1940 the WPA Symphony in Michigan performed her new composition, Symphony No. Marian Anderson chose Price’s arrangement of My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord when she gave her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Under the name Vee Jay she also wrote a number of popular tunes such as Songs to the Dark Virgin and Hold Fast to Dreams. Throughout the rest of the 1930s Price taught music lessons, continued to compose for piano and organ, and worked as an orchestrator for WGN radio and as an organist for silent films. Price was the first black female classical composer to achieve this level of recognition in the United States and Europe. Eventually European orchestras also performed her works. In 1932 she won multiple prizes from the Wanamaker Foundation for Piano Sonata in E Minor and her most famous work, Symphony in E Minor. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Symphony in E Minor at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, followed quickly by orchestras in Michigan and Pennsylvania. She composed Fantasie Negre in 1929 for piano. Schirmer, a major publishing house, accepted her work At the Cotton Gin.
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Her compositions combined the melody and rhythms of black culture, black religious spirituality, and European romantic mood and techniques. Price studied at the American Conservatory of Music and the Chicago Musical College.
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It was here that Price was able to reach her full musical potential, but unfortunately, it came with the end of her marriage in 1935. When serious racial unrest erupted in Little Rock, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1927. Price started a music school and continued to compose piano pieces, but she was denied membership in the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association because of her race. The couple had three children, a son, who died in infancy, and two daughters. In 1912 Smith returned to Arkansas where she wed Thomas Jewell Price, a well-known Little Rock, Arkansas attorney. Smith taught at the Cotton Plant-Arkadelphia Academy and at Shorter College until 1910 when she accepted a position as Chair of the Music Department at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia. At fourteen, she studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, graduating in 1907 with a Bachelor of Music degree. While attending Capitol Hill School in Little Rock, she published her first composition when she was eleven. Under her mother’s musical tutelage, Smith was quickly recognized as a prodigy. Smith, a dentist, and Florence Gulliver Smith, a former school teacher and private lesson piano teacher who also managed several local businesses.
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Florence Beatrice Smith, the first black woman composer to garner an international reputation, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, to James H.