The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (Music in American Life)

Book Prize Winner of the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works. Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples. | Cover Title Copyright Contents Foreword by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. Acknowledgments Sources Introduction Part I: Southern Roots 1. Family Ties 2. Little Rock: "The Negro Paradise" 3. The Pursuit of Education: Elementary and High School 4. The New England Conservatory of Music 5. Return to Little Rock 6. Clark University and Marriage Part II: The "Dean" of Negro Composers of the Midwest 7. VeeJay and the Black Metropolis 8. "My Soul's Been Anchored in de Lord" 9. Black Satin Clothes at the Fair 10. Spirituals to Symphonies: A Century of Progress 11. The Symphony in E Minor 12. O Sing a New Song 13. The Piano Concerto in One Movement 14. Performing Again 15. Professional Recognition: Reconciling Gender, Class, and Race 16. The WPA Years 17. The Chicago Renaissance 18. The Symphony No. 3 19. Final Years: The Heart of a Woman Postscript Afterword by Carlene J. Brown Notes Selected Bibliography Discography For Further Reading Index Back Cover |"A rich contribution to Arkansas cultural history." — Arkansas Historical Quarterly " The Heart of a Woman thus conveys the tenacity and resilience of two groundbreaking practitioners: it is the culmination of a lifetime's scholarship and the first monograph to tell Price's story in such depth and breadth. . . . A call to take Brown's work forward, to make audible the fullness of Price's compositional voice, and to render this resurgence into permanent visibility." — Journal of American Musicological Society " The Heart of a Woman is more than a biography. It is an interdisciplinary work whose analytical explorations of race, gender, and class in American classical music is anchored by extensive musicological, archival, and oral history research on one of America's most prolific twentieth-century composers." — Journal of African American History | Rae Linda Brown was a professor at the University of Michigan and a professor and Robert and Marjorie Rawlins Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She was the author of Music, Printed and Manuscript, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters: An Annotated Catalog . She died in 2017. Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop . "Florence B. Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman composer to achieve national recognition. She grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, studies at the new England Conservatory, and spent her professional career in Chicago (1927-53), where her Symphony in E Minor, premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 under the direction of Frederick Stock, marks the first large-scale work by an African American woman composer (and the second work by an African American composer) to be performed by a major American orchestra. A prolific composer, she wrote more than 300 works in all genres: orchestra music (symphonies, orchestral suites, and concerti), vocal music, art songs and arrangements of spirituals, piano music (including teaching pieces), organ music, chamber music, and music for chorus. Her compositions reflect not only her cultural heritage, but also the romantic nationalist style of the period in which she was most active (beginning in the 1920s). Brown discusses Price in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and deals with issues of race, gender, and class. She draws on interviews with Price's colleagues, on music manuscripts located in major repositories of African American material and in private collections, on contemporary black newspapers and journals, on census records, and on archival materials as well as the relevant published sources. An appendix lists Price's compositions by genre"-- Provided by publisher "Florence B. Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman composer to achieve national recognition. She grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, studied at the new England Conservatory, and spent her professional career in Chicago (1927-53), where her Symphony in E Minor, premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 under the direction of Frederick Stock, marks the first large-scale work by an African American woman composer (and the second work by an African American composer) to be performed by a major American orchestra. A prolific composer, she wrote more than 300 works in all genres: orchestra music (symphonies, orchestral suites, and concerti), vocal music, art songs and arrangements of spirituals, piano music (including teaching pieces), organ music, chamber music, and music for chorus. Her compositions reflect not only her cultural heritage, but also the romantic nationalist style of the period in which she was most active (beginning in the 1920s). Brown discusses Price in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and deals with issues of race, gender, and class. She draws on interviews with Price's colleagues, on music manuscripts located in major repositories of African American material and in private collections, on contemporary black newspapers and journals, on census records, and on archival materials as well as the relevant published sources."-- Provided by publisher