Born in Arkansas in 1887, Florence Price was the first Black woman to earn recognition in the United States as a composer. She received her early music education from her mother, a soprano and pianist. At 14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, studying piano, organ, and composition. After teaching music in Arkansas for 20 years, she and her family moved to Chicago in 1927, where she established herself as a leading concert pianist, organist, and prolific composer of over 300 works. When Price moved in with her close friend Margaret Bonds upon her divorce in 1931, she became even more productive. In 1932, she won a Wanamaker Foundation Award for her Symphony in E Minor; under the baton of Frederick Stock, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the work a year later. The Chicago Daily News declared it “Faultless … a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion, worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.”
While interest in Price’s music waned with her death in 1953, in 2009, a family moved into a house in St. Anne, Illinois, that had been vacant for 50 years. In a dusty attic were boxes full of Price’s manuscripts. That discovery, along with current events underscoring inequity in classical music, helped spark muchdeserved renewed interest in her music. Today, the String Quartet in G Major is one of Price’s most well-known pieces. Composed in 1929, the unfinished work illustrates many of the features associated with her style. The opening Allegro features many musical themes, frequent key changes, and short musical themes that move seamlessly from one to the next. The second movement, marked “Andante moderato,” is often performed as a version for full orchestra and evokes the style of American folk song. In the middle of the movement is a mercurial trio, a series of variations on the theme marked “Allegretto.”
