Florence Price

Florence Price, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, was an American composer who made history as the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, when the Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony No. 1 in E minor in 1933. Trained at the New England Conservatory, she built a career as a pianist, organist, and teacher before settling in Chicago, where she came to prominence amid the cultural flowering of the era. Her music fuses the forms and idioms of European Romanticism with the spirituals, dances, and rhythms of African-American tradition, producing a warm, lyrical, and distinctly American voice. Long neglected after her death in 1953, Price has undergone a dramatic rediscovery in recent years, spurred by the 2009 discovery of a trove of her manuscripts in an abandoned house near St. Anne, Illinois, and is now celebrated as a major figure in American music. Her appearance at the New Year’s Concert, a first for an American woman in this Viennese stronghold, reflects the orchestra’s recent broadening of its programming.