FLORENCE PRICE: FANTASIE NO.

1 IN G MINOR FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO

FLORENCE B. PRICE (1887-1953) achieved a level of renown that defied all expectations for an
African American woman in her day.1 Having studied at the New England Conservatory from 1903 to
1906, taught in the Music Department at Shorter College (Little Rock), and headed the Music
Department at Clark University (Atlanta), she married and bore two children in her native Arkansas
before moving to Chicago with her husband and daughters in 1927 due to the persistent climate of racial
violence in the South.2 Despite the formidable challenges of leaving behind family and friends to relocate
to a new and radically different home, as well as the marital difficulties that led to her divorce in 1931, she
thrived in Chicago. There she became actively involved in the bustling cultural life of a city that was gearing
up to celebrate its centenary – joining the R. Nathaniel Dett Club of Music and the Allied Arts, attending
Chicago Musical College, and studying harmony and orchestration with Wesley La Violette (1894-1978)
and composition with Carl Busch (1862-1943) before graduating in 1934.3 Her unquenchable thirst for
learning and her expansive intellect led her to continue her studies for years beyond this second
graduation, taking courses in a variety of subjects at the American Conservatory, Chicago Teachers
College, Central YMCA College, the Lewis Institute, and the University of Chicago.

And through it all, she composed. Florence B. Price penned several hundred compositions of
astonishing richness and breadth, each bespeaking a musical imagination that would not be stilled despite
the limitations that her world would have imposed on her because of her race and her sex. Latter-day
commentaries unanimously and justly cite the performance of her First Symphony by the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra as part of the World’s Fair in 1933 as evidence of her extraordinary success in
overcoming the pervasive institutional racism and sexism of the United States. But her renown spread
much farther than that, and lasted much longer. Her music was performed by at least nine major
orchestras, and her vocal and instrumental chamber music and piano compositions were performed by
some of the great soloists of her day. So great was her eminence even a decade after her death that the
musical and educational metropolis of Chicago named the Florence B. Price Elementary School after her
in 1964. That school closed in 2012, but the same building still bears her name: the Florence B. Price
Twenty-First Century Academy for Excellence.

At her death in 1953, Price left behind several hundred musical compositions of a truly astonishing
stylistic breadth and diversity – works that employed the “classical” styles that had been the focus of her
musical education alongside Black styles that were traditionally segregated out from those traditionally
White repertoires, and often synthesizing the two. She published some of these works with firms including
G. Schirmer, but her race and sex proved difficult obstacles in the world of publication, and at any rate the
process of publishing required a significant time and effort that, apparently in her estimation, would be
better spent composing new music. Most of her music thus remained in manuscript at her death.

Price’s reputation has been steadily broadening in recent decades thanks to dedicated and brilliant
scholarly work by Rae Linda Brown, Barbara Garvey Jackson, Eileen Southern, and Helen Walker-Hill,
among others.4 But if Price the composer never had to be rediscovered, the same could not be said of her

1
Although Price is mentioned in many texts that deal with African American composers and women in music, many of these
sources repeat the same, rather basic information; there is still no book-length biography. The most detailed and authoritative
biography currently available is the Introduction to the late Rae Linda Brown’s edition of Price’s First and Third Symphonies
(“Lifting the Veil: The Symphonies of Florence B. Price,” in Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, ed. Rae Linda Brown
and Wayne Shirley, Recent Researches in American Music, No. 66 [Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 2008], xv-lii).
2
Although the literature on the violent racism of U.S. culture during Price’s lifetime is extensive, the best recent exploration of
the Great Migration as a response to these issues is Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of
America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).
3
Brown, “Lifting the Veil,” xxiv.
4
See, for example, Barbara Garvey Jackson: “Florence Price, Composer,” The Black Perspective in Music 5 (1977), 30–43;
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971; 3 ed., 1997); Rae Linda
rd

Brown, “Selected Orchestral Music of Florence B. Price (1888 [sic] – 1953) in the Context of Her Life and Work (Ph.D. diss.,
music itself – simply because she published only a tiny portion of what she wrote. That began to change
when her elder daughter, Florence Price Robinson (1917-75) donated a significant body of her music
manuscripts and biographical materials to the University of Arkansas Libraries (Fayetteville), and the
situation further improved with that library’s acquisition of a sizeable “addendum” in the late 1980s.
Another major development was the discovery of a sizeable trove of music manuscripts and other
documents in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009 – and with the major media coverage that
eventually attended that discovery, the musical world became aware that hundreds of priceless manuscripts
by one of the most extraordinary voices of twentieth-century musical culture in the United States were now
accessible for the first time since her death. Florence Price, having already during her lifetime overcome
the forcible silencing that was her lot as an African American and a woman in a profoundly racist and
sexist world, could now break the silence anew.

G. Schirmer’s acquisition of the rights to Price’s complete catalog in 2018 gave crucial momentum
to the task of allowing Florence Price’s extraordinary musical voice to break the silence forced upon it
since her death; the present edition owes its existence to that acquisition. The edition is also made possible
by the generosity of the heirs of Florence B. Price, and by the Special Collections division of the
University of Arkansas Libraries (Fayetteville). Thanks also to David Flachs and Peter Martin at G.
Schirmer, Inc., and to Price advocate and pianist extraordinaire Lara Downes for her encouragement to
pursue these editions. Finally, I thank my family for patience and support unending.

***

THE FANTASIE NO. 1 IN G MINOR FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO is the first of Price’s two works in that
genre. The autograph is dated July 15-16, 1933. This date places it in the chronological vicinity of some of
Price’s works that are best known today: the First (E-minor) Fantasie nègre (1929-32)5 and Piano Sonata in
E Minor (1932), the First Symphony (1932), the Piano Concerto in D Minor (1932-34). Like all those
already well-known compositions, the Violin Fantasy No. 1 reflects Price’s remarkable fluency in
synthesizing the traditions and idioms of post-Romantic concert music with the melodic and harmonic
idioms of African American folksong. The Fantasy begins with a cadenza-like improvisatory passage that
covers the entire range of the violin part, from g to g3. The contrapuntally conceived main theme (mm.
13ff.) bears little compelling evidence of African American influence aside from its use of the natural
seventh scale degree, but the gapped scales and chord-picking accompaniment of the new, transitional
material that abruptly intrudes in B major, lento, at m. 38 clearly evokes those styles, and that character
does not abate with the return of the defining motive of the main theme – still lento – in mm. 56-59. The
African American influences become clearer still with the exquisitely beautiful B-flat major theme
introduced in m. 61 – structurally and stylistically, the heart of the work. The dialog-like character of the
transition back to G minor (mm. 89-93) may evoke call-and-response textures of traditional Black
repertoires, but those influences again disappear – temporarily – with the return to the main theme. The
coda may be understood as the moment of reconciliation of the two stylistic worlds inhabited by the earlier
material: on the one hand, it clearly derives from the main theme; but at the same time the rhythmic
language and gapped scales of the violin part in mm. 101ff. and the character of mm. 118-21 fully integrate

Yale University, 1987); Helen Walker-Hill, “Music by Black Women Composers at the American Music Research Center,”
American Music Research Center Journal 2 (1992): 23-52; Calvert Johnson, “Florence Beatrice Price: Chicago Renaissance
Woman,” The American Organist 34 (2000): 68-76; Scott David Farrah, “Signifyin(g): A semiotic Analysis of Symphonic
Works by William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson, and Florence B. Price” (Ph.D. diss, Florida State University, 2007);
Douglas Shadle, “Plus ça change: Florence B. Price In The #Blacklivesmatter Era,” NewMusicBox 20 February 2019, New
Music USA, accessed 21 September 2019, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/plus-ca-change-florence-b-price-in-the-
blacklivesmatter-era/.
5
The Second and Fourth Fantasies nègres, in G minor and B minor respectively, will be published by G. Schirmer in March
2020.
African American gestures into the stylistic vocabulary of the work as a whole. Most remarkable of all,
despite the Fantasy’s cultivation of abrupt shifts and interruptions that give it a decidedly unstudied
character, it is in fact a highly structured and symmetrical composition in which the introduction and coda
frame a thematic and tonal dialog between G minor and B-flat major and the idioms of the cultivated and
vernacular traditions:

ABOUT THIS EDITION

The primary copy-text for this edition is Florence Price’s autograph score (Special Collections of
the Mullins Library of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Florence Price Papers MC 988b, Box 4A,
folder 2); that same folder contains an autograph violin part which was consulted for clarifications and
verifications. The edition gives Price’s music exactly as she wrote it, with minimal editorial intervention.
Authorial accidentals, including cautionary accidentals, are presented as found in the copy-text, while
editorial accidentals are treated as musica ficta by means of a symbol above or below the affected voice.
Editorial dynamics are given in Roman font and enclosed in brackets, editorial slurs are perforated, and
editorial extensions of crescendo and diminuendo markings are hooked at each end. Because beamings,
abbreviations, and other note-groupings can suggest important information about phrasing for performers,
the edition transmits these as they appear in the autograph full score.

CRITICAL NOTES

Notes identify measure number, instrument, beat(s), and note or rest within the beat and instances
where the autograph full score differs from the text as given in the edition. Thus, “33 Pf. RH 8va only over
/1.1” means that in m. 33 in the piano part the 8va only appears to cover the first note of beat 1:

14 Vln. /1 (second time only): only sketched in AS 1, but double stop in AP 1 (adopted here); 33
Pf RH 8va only over /1.1 in AS 1, here extended because LH makes obvious that RH has to continue 8va
through end of bar; 93 Pf. fermata omitted in AS 1; 109 Vln. “poco rit.” on /2 in AS 1; 109 Pf. “ritard” on
/1 in AS 1; RH flag on A - C omitted in AS 1; 122-25 Vln. notated as thirty-second notes in AS 1 and AP
1, but correct number of notes in bar for sixteenth notes; 131 Pf. empty in AS 1.

– John Michael Cooper

Denton, Texas, 13 October 2019