07/21/2025
Our Arkansas Flute Society flute choir is gearing up to perform at the National Flute Convention in a few weeks! 🎶
We're so excited to share a recital celebrating Florence Price in Atlanta on Sunday, August 10th!
Keep reading to learn more about this incredible composer we are celebrating:
"Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She began learning music from her mother at an early age and gave her first piano performance at age four, reportedly publishing a composition at age eleven. She graduated high school at the age of sixteen and in that same year was accepted into the New England Conservatory.
She returned to Little Rock and married Thomas Price in 1912. In the late 1920s, racial tensions were growing, and Little Rock became more frightening and unsafe for Black Americans. Fearful for their lives, the Price family fled to Chicago because it was considered the land of opportunity for many African Americans.
While in Chicago, Price became the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony No. 1 in E minor in 1933.
The historic June 15th concert entitled “The Negro in Music” also included works by Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and John Alden Carpenter. Although her music career would remain an uphill battle, this premiere did bring instant recognition and fame to Florence Price.
Her writing is a unique combination of traditional African-American spirituals and folk music with modernism. She had a special talent for compelling orchestration, lyricism, and richness. Some of her works have titles referencing the Black experience in the South, while others use the melody and rhythms of spirituals and other traditional pieces."
(Sources: FlorencePrice.com and ChicagoPathways.org/florence-price)
We are thrilled to share a concert full of Price's works arranged for flute ensemble in honor of Florence Price and the 2025 convention theme, Unity and Universal Oneness. 🌎
