August 23
On August 23, 1935, Florence Price wrote a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, asking him to consider performing her work. She explained that she was a woman, Black, and from Arkansas, and acknowledged that "these factors make it doubly difficult for me." She had recently had her Symphony No. 1 in E minor performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — the first symphony by a Black woman performed by a major American orchestra — but struggled to get her subsequent work placed.
Price was born on April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a music teacher and her father was a dentist. She entered the New England Conservatory of Music at the age of fourteen, graduating in 1906 with honors. The racial climate in Arkansas had become dangerous enough by 1927 that she moved to Chicago with her daughters, leaving her husband behind. She arrived during the Chicago Black Renaissance and found a community of Black artists and musicians who shaped her compositional development.
Her Symphony No. 1 premiered on June 15, 1933, at the Century of Progress Exposition — a world's fair. The conductor was Frederick Stock. It was the first time a major American orchestra had performed a symphony by a Black woman. The Chicago Tribune covered it. It is the only time in Price's lifetime that a major American orchestra performed her orchestral work.
She composed over three hundred pieces: four symphonies, two violin concertos, piano concertos, chamber music, art songs, spirituals, arrangements. She died in 1953. Her manuscripts were largely forgotten until 2009, when a real estate developer discovered boxes of her scores and correspondence in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois — a house she had used as a summer cottage. The manuscripts had been sitting in the walls and attic for fifty years.
The recovered manuscripts led to a cascade of re-discoveries: recordings, scholarly editions, new performances. Her Symphony No. 1 was recorded by the Chicago Philharmonic in 2021, eighty-eight years after its premiere.
The Koussevitzky letter is the document. Price told him directly what the obstacles were — not as a complaint but as professional correspondence explaining her situation. He did not respond, at least not in any record that has been found. The manuscripts in the walls of the summer cottage are the physical record of what happened to her work after her death: not destroyed, not published, just left.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.