I have been playing the piano since I was three years old – it always felt like this instrument is a part of who I am. But for most of my musical education, it didn’t really occur to me that there could be a deeper history of women and people of African descent in classical music. Later, I fell in love with musicology, and the idea of being able to tell a history of the world through music. But I didn’t necessarily see that something was missing until my second year of undergraduate study, when I went to McGill University in 2009. Seeing names like Nadia and Lili Boulanger on the syllabus for the early twentieth-century music course really opened my eyes to the presence of women in this history. And then following their names were Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, and the revelation that there were black women too! That was such a powerful moment.
It was at that time that I first heard Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre no. 1. It was as if I had been taken into a world where there was nothing else around me, only that piece. I could hear all of my training as a classical pianist, the influence of the whole Romantic tradition, but then there was something else – the musical heritage of spirituals. I wouldn’t say that I was familiar with spirituals at all: growing up in the UK, this wasn’t music that I would hear or encounter. Rather, it was a counter-history that I was hearing in this music. And then shortly after, when I heard the music of Margaret Bonds (who was a student of Florence Price) – specifically, the piece Troubled Water, that was particularly important. I wasn’t just being presented with one Black woman composer, as an anomaly. Rather, Bonds helped show me a shared, deeper history.
Florence Price, née Smith, is often said to have been born in 1887 – but I’ve seen in her own hand that she was born in 1888. Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and what’s striking about her background is that she was middle- to upper-class. An “aristocrat of colour” was the description her biographer Rae Linda Brown used. Because her family were of mixed racial background, it gave them the ability to thrive within the dominant culture, more so than if they had been of a darker complexion.
Because the Smith family were relatively racially ambiguous, it allowed them to enter certain spaces. For instance, Florence’s father was a dentist, and one of his clients was the governor of Arkansas. Price’s mother was a society woman: she came from a family of businessmen. By the time Price was born, Arkansas was known as a thriving place for people of her background. As a result, she experienced a more-or-less bourgeois upbringing, with music and politicians passing through her mother’s salons and soirées.
Price started playing the piano at the age of three, and was already composing from an early age. Her day-to-day life was different to many Black girls of her generation, who would not have had the leisure to spend time composing or playing their instruments. They would, perhaps, have more likely been working with their parents, performing various forms of agricultural or manual labour. By comparison Florence Price was, relatively speaking, born into a life of privilege that set her up quite well for what would come later.
Price’s move to Chicago in the late 1920s can be seen in the wider context of the Great Migration: the mass exodus of Black people from the South to the urban North and Midwest. While slavery is over, all that meant was that the law became even more strategic in how it kept the Black populace suppressed. Under the Jim Crow laws, Little Rock witnessed riots and lynchings. In essence nobody was safe.
Opportunities for working-class and middle- to upper-class Black people were far more numerous in the North. But it wasn’t necessarily just economic motivations that stimulated Price’s move to Chicago – she had family there. Price had been visiting Chicago since at least 1918, ten years prior to her relocation, and the city was already quite familiar to her.
In Chicago there were already many talented Black women active: Nora Holt, for example, was the first Black person in the US to obtain a Masters in music. Helen Hagan was the first black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music. Maude Roberts George was a celebrated soprano and society woman, with connections not only within Black Chicago, but also to institutions such as the Chicago Symphony. From my research, I have found that when Florence Price arrived, it seems like this terrain was already quite familiar, due to her many trips back and forth.
Another crucial person in this community was Estella Bonds, who kept a large house on the south side of Chicago, where virtually every Black musician passing through the city was likely to stay – to exchange ideas, or to play music. When Florence Price arrived in Chicago, Estella Bonds was one of the first people to help launch her career. Her daughter Margaret was about 13 at that time and would become one of Price’s most important collaborators.
It’s significant that once Price moves to Chicago, the scale of her works begins to grow. When she was in Arkansas, I’m not saying that she wasn’t capable – she wrote a symphony when she was a teenager, she had already shown that she was capable of writing in large-scale forms – but what she needed was the platform. Estella Bonds not only helped launch Price’s career, but was also promoting two-piano performance herself. Margaret Bonds would have been used to playing concertos in this way. That’s what was needed, and what was lacking in Little Rock.
Price’s Piano Concerto is composed in 1934. A year prior to that, the First Symphony had catalysed Price’s career, as the most prominent Black female symphonic composer. From there, having established herself, another large-scale composition became a more feasible endeavour. She wrote a two-piano version of her Concerto – it should be emphasised that two-piano versions weren’t just rehearsal scores, but full versions (often crucial for marginalised composers to present their work). Price performed the Concerto as a standalone work, with Margaret Bonds on the second piano. It’s not entirely clear who was the soloist, but we do know the two of them performed it together.
The Concerto was well-received. In summer 1934, the Concerto is performed again, as part of the Century of Progress Chicago World’s Fair and Exposition. Margaret Bonds was the soloist, Ebba Sundstrom Nylander is the conductor, and the orchestra was the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago. This as an incredible occasion, because even though it’s a woman’s group, the segregation in Chicago and the US as a whole is profound: White women and Black women didn’t often mix. This concert in 1934 is a remarkable interracial collaboration, in which Margaret Bonds was the Black female soloist, performing the music of Florence Price. This performance was also tremendously well-received.
As a pianist recording Price’s music, I wanted to convey her at her most virtuosic and most expressive. For that reason, I was also drawn to her Sonata in E Minor, a three-movement piano work that she wrote for the Wanamaker Competition, submitted alongside her award-winning Symphony. These are both ambitious, large-scale works: she’s determined to win, she’s determined to prove herself. Price’s Sonata is just so bold and rich. It shows off her capacity as a melodist, her ability to take ideas from African-American folk music and transform them into something original.
In the early stages of my research, I also knew that there were other Fantasies besides Fantasie Nègre no. 1, but I hadn’t yet seen them. Around 2019, I went to Arkansas in order to find out more. The Second and Fourth Fantasies are in minor keys, rich, and reminiscent of Brahms. But I could only find two pages of the Third Fantasie. That seemed to derail my plans to record the complete set! But I could see that these two pages had so much in common with the other Fantasies, in terms of its rich minor key, and these beautiful melodies that float in – but then it ends abruptly after the second page. I remember thinking: is it acceptable to just record two pages only? Or should I see what I could do to piece the work together?
In the end, I decided to connect the materials I had, the two pages of the Third Fantasie and other piano music of hers that exists in fragments. I borrowed a motif, a little idea from earlier, which enabled me to stitch these pages together. I remember playing it at home and thinking: I don’t know whether or not this is it. But this feels right, and this is what I want to share. Whether or not I stitched together two completely separate pieces, it’s still her, it’s still all her own composition. I haven’t added anything that she didn’t write herself. So that’s how I ended up recording and being able to share all four Fantasies – and, so far, no one has come along and told me that anything is wrong.
Price had a summer house in Saint Anne, Illinois, where she had her grand piano and she would compose. She left compositions in storage there, as her living situation in the city was far more precarious. After her death, one of her daughters, Florence Louise Robinson, inherited the house. But even though Robinson had been in contact with the University of Arkansas in order to build Price’s archives, that connection seems to have been lost after her death in 1975. The house became overgrown, and it was vandalized and broken into, with Price’s piano stolen.
Several decades later, in 2009, a couple had bought the summer house. By this time, it was extremely dilapidated. The new owners were going through what remained of the cabinets, and they came across huge amounts of music. They saw this name: Florence B Price, and had the good sense to at least Google it instead of making the decision to throw all the sheet music out.
Rae Linda Brown, Price’s first biographer, knew through her research that all this music was probably out there, but she and other researchers just didn’t know where it was. When the Arkansas archivists reviewed what was found, all of these pieces that we knew of – like the four Fantasies instead of just the First, the additional Symphonies instead of just the First, and all this chamber music – it was all there.
It’s such an incredible story, and I reflect on the fact that, in 2009, while I was having my own epiphany about Florence Price during my studies at McGill, at the same time there was something enormous happening that eventually would change my life as a musicologist and performer. From the recovery of all this music in 2009 to 2019 when I was then able to piece together these Fantasies and record all four for the first time, I’m just really honoured now to be at this point in my career where I can add to the story of the rediscovery of Price’s music, especially when we think of how much we could have lost.
See forthcoming performances by Samantha Ege and Florence Price.
