First Black Woman Composer for the Chicago Symphony — Her Scores Were Rotting Under a Fallen Tree

Florence Price apologized for being a woman and being Black just to get a conductor to open her score. This was 1943, ten years after she made history with the Chicago Symphony. She asked him only to judge her on merit alone, and he never wrote back.

A tree had come through the roof. That is how the house looked in 2009, on the edge of St. Anne, Illinois, when Vicki and Darrell Gatwood went to fix it up.

The grass had grown wild and the floors had sunk. Someone had broken in and picked through the place long before they got there.

In one corner the rain had not reached, there were stacks of paper.

Books, letters, photographs, and page after page of handwritten music. One name kept showing up on the pages.

Florence Price.

The Gatwoods looked her up. They learned the woman whose papers were rotting in their house had been the first Black woman in America to have her music played by a major orchestra.

Sit with that for a second.

A woman makes history, and seventy years later her life’s work is in a falling-down house with a hole in the roof.

To understand how it got there, you have to go back to one night in Chicago, when the room was finally hers.

It was June 15, 1933. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra filled the stage of the Auditorium Theatre, part of the World’s Fair the city was throwing for its hundredth birthday.

Florence Price was forty-six, sitting out in the audience. Every musician on that stage was a man, and every one of them was white.

The conductor was Frederick Stock, a German who led one of the finest orchestras in the country. He had never met Price.

Her symphony had won first prize in a national competition the year before, and Stock, scouting new American music for the fair, chose it as the night’s centerpiece. He raised his baton over a piece written by a Black woman, in a country that had decided people like her did not write symphonies.

The night had not come easy.

Maude Roberts George, who led the Chicago Music Association and wrote for the Chicago Defender, raised the money to put the concert on. A Black woman had paid the way for this history to happen.

Price was not even the only history made on that stage that night. Her former student Margaret Bonds took the piano for another work and became the first Black woman to appear as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony.

Then the orchestra began to play.

What she had written came from two worlds at once. It held the European form she had trained in, and it held the spirituals and the Juba dance rhythms she had grown up inside.

When the last note settled, the hall knew it had heard something real. The reviewer for the Chicago Daily News called it a faultless work and said it belonged in the regular symphonic repertory.

Almost nobody in that room understood what they had just witnessed.

It was the first time a major American orchestra had ever performed a large-scale work by a Black woman.

She had been building toward that night her whole life. She was born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock in 1887, daughter of the only Black dentist in town and a mother who taught music.

She gave her first recital at four and published her first piece at eleven. She finished high school as valedictorian and was ready for the conservatory.

There was one problem, and her mother solved it with a lie.

When Florence applied to the New England Conservatory in Boston, the form asked for her hometown, and her mother told her to write Pueblo, Mexico. A Mexican girl would meet fewer slammed doors in Boston than a Black girl from Arkansas.

So at fifteen, before she could study the music she loved, she erased where she came from.

It worked. She got in, and she was good enough that the school’s president, the composer George Chadwick, took her on as one of his own private students.

She graduated with honors in 1906, taught, married a lawyer named Thomas Price, and started a family. Then Little Rock turned on its Black families.

In 1927 a lynching happened only a few blocks from the Price home. Like so many Black families in those years, they packed up and went north.

Chicago was supposed to be safety. For her marriage it was the opposite, and after years that turned harsh she divorced Thomas in 1931 and was raising her daughters alone.

To feed them, she took whatever the music would pay for.

She played the organ for silent films. She wrote jingles for the radio under a made-up name.

That is who walked into history.

Here is what history did with her.

Ten years after the Chicago Symphony played her work, in 1943, she sat down to write a letter. It went to Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and she needed him to look at her music.

Read how she had to begin it.

She opened with an apology for existing.

“To begin with I have two handicaps, those of sex and race,” she wrote. “I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”

She had already made history. She still began by apologizing for who she was.

By then her work had been played in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn. None of it spared her from having to reassure a Boston conductor she was worth a glance.

Then came the request, and it is a hard thing to sit with.

She asked him to hold back the impulse to treat a woman’s music as long on feeling and short on thought, at least until he had looked at some of it. On the matter of race, she said she asked for no concession at all.

Her own words were plain. “I should like to be judged on merit alone.”

That was the whole ask. Not a favor, just a fair hearing.

Koussevitzky never answered.

The letter went into his files and stayed there. The most prominent conductor in the country had nothing to say to her.

Think about what that silence held.

A woman who had already made history still had to plead, and the pleading got her nothing. She kept writing anyway.

Five symphonies. Concertos, string quartets, hundreds of songs, almost none of it performed while she lived.

She died in Chicago on June 3, 1953, after a stroke. She was sixty-six.

Within a few years her instrumental music slipped out of the concert halls almost entirely.

Her scores went into boxes, the boxes went into a summer house, and the house was left behind. The roof opened, the rain came in, and the country forgot there had ever been a Florence Price.

But the silence never got all of her.

Four years before that letter, her music had already filled the largest open-air crowd the country had yet gathered. On Easter Sunday in 1939, Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

She had been refused the use of Constitution Hall because she was Black, so she sang outside instead. Seventy-five thousand people stood in front of her, with a radio audience listening across the country.

The last song she sang, the one that closed the whole afternoon, was “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” Price had arranged it.

Her music was the final sound floating over that crowd, even as the concert halls ignored it on paper.

The radio broadcast cut out before that last song, a technical limit of the day. So the millions listening at home never even caught the name of the woman who wrote what closed the Lincoln Memorial.

Which brings it back to the house with the tree through the roof.

The Gatwoods could have thrown those soaked pages in a dumpster, and almost anyone would have. Instead, they made a phone call.

Two archivists from the University of Arkansas, the state where she was born, drove up to Illinois with no idea what waited for them. Even standing inside the house, Tim Nutt later said, they did not yet grasp how big the find would turn out to be.

What those boxes held were dozens of scores the world had written off. Among them were two violin concertos and the proof that she had written five symphonies, not the handful anyone remembered.

All of it was in her own hand, pulled from the one corner of the house the rain had spared.

Her Fourth Symphony was in that pile.

She had finished it in 1945 and died without hearing a single note of it. In 2018, an orchestra in Fort Smith, Arkansas finally gave it a first performance, sixty-five years after she was gone.

The Philadelphia Orchestra recorded her First Symphony.

Concert halls that never once spoke her name now print it in their programs.

She asked one man, back in 1943, to judge her on merit alone. It took the better part of a century and a hole in a roof, but the merit is on the stand at last.

Somewhere tonight an orchestra is tuning before one of her symphonies, the same restless sound that filled that Chicago hall in 1933. This time the whole room knows whose music it is, and her name is on every page on every stand.