Harper Theater in Chicago

Some of my friends who have given performances of Price's Adoration have sent me video recordings which I have been listening to in the my Chicago hotel room (using headphones, of course) while Michael sleeps. Festivities over at the hospital begin this morning at 10:00 (labs, an appointment with my doctor, and a procedure to insert a port under my right collarbone for the chemotherapy I will get tomorrow and then for the stem cells that will follow the next day).

Our hotel, on Harper Court and 53rd Street, is located in what feels like the center of the universe. Last night we walked across the street to Virtue, where we had a remarkable dinner, and this evening we are planning to cross the same street and see Toy Story 5 at the Harper Theater.

I have had this constant thought over the past several months that Florence Price, who lived on the south side of Chicago, and played the organ in movie theaters, might have worked in this neighborhood. I wonder if she ever played at the Harper. And while doing all this wondering, I can't seem to figure out any reason why she wouldn't have.

The theater was built in 1913 as a vaudeville house and became a movie theater in 1935. You can read a little about it here. It had a Kimball organ. Florence Price was an organist and a composer, who certainly would have been able to improvise accompaniments to the silent movies that would have been shown at the Harper.

Here is a Facebook page about the Harper that has a great photo (I can't figure out how to include it in this post using hotel wifi). And here's a 2008 post in Hyde Park Progress (long live the blogosphere) that has a great deal of information about the Harper Theater.

What a Concert!

The above video is set to start where my transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration" starts, but do listen to the rest of the concert, particularly concertmaster Albena Danailova's performance of the violin solo in Massenet's "Méditation from Thaïs," and Bryn Terfel's performance of "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.

I was deeply impressed with the way Lorenzo Viotti shaped the phrases of "Adoration." An arranger can only present possibilities, but a great conductor can take them where they need to go in order to sound their best. The experience of hearing the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic, an ensemble steeped in such a rich musical history, connect their hearts and souls collectively to the music of Florence Price was overwhelming. It also made me smile when I noticed a gentle touch of the special and inimatible lilt that is built into the orchestra's DNA.

And I am so pleased to share this excerpt from a review of the concert.

Who could ask for anything more?

My Arrangement of Price's "Adoration" to be Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic!

I just learned the other day that for their Sommernachtskonzert on June 19, 2026 the Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Lorenzo Viotti, has programmed my arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration."

I remember looking at the organ music (Price's original) for the first time in the winter of 2013, and being blown away by what I heard. I immediately made setting of it for violin and piano, and brought it to my friend John David Moore's house to play it through. We decided to include it on the concert we were planning for February 28, 2014.

The two of us were the only people who knew it as a piece for violin and piano. And that concert increased the number of "Adoration" cognoscenti by a few dozen.

I decided to make a string orchestra version of the piece for our local Summer Strings orchestra, and shared that arrangement, as well as the violin and piano arrangement in the IMSLP. You can find all of my arrangements of "Adoration" here, along with settings by me and by other arrangers. The number of musicians who enjoyed playing the piece increased exponentially. And the number of people who enjoyed listening increased exponentially as well.

During her lifetime Florence Price never got the kind of recognition she deserved for her exquisite work. The idea of the Vienna Philharmonic including a piece written by her on one of their concerts would, I am certain, have been something far beyond her wildest dreams.

And having an arrangement of mine being performed by the Vienna Philharmonic is nothing I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I feel so grateful that I have had the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to do Price's "Adoration" justice as a piece for string orchestra (as well as one for violin and orchestra), and I feel so grateful to the people who chose the music for this Vienna Philharmonic Sommernachtskonzert for putting the Price on the program.

Back in the very early 1980s, when I was studying recorder in Vienna, and playing flute and recorder on the Kärntner Straße in order to pay for rent and food, and hanging out at Jazz clubs with my friend Leo Wright, I never would have imagined being "present" in the city in this way. But here we are.

Florence Price Piano Music

On my way back from a trip to Boston by train I had time in Chicago between trains to visit Performer's Music. It felt very special to buy these books of Florence Price's piano music in Chicago, the city where she spent most of her career. I also imagine that she might have spent a considerable amount of time in the Fine Arts Building.

What a treat these pieces are to play!

Florence Price Thrift Store Find

Imagine my surprise when I opened up this book and found a Florence Price song.

And if you are curious about Marie Whitbeck Clark, you might consider looking at this.

Florence Price Thumbnail Sketches transcribed for String Quartet

It does my heart good to see so many Florence Price birthday celebrations in these internets, including a great article by Samantha Ege and Douglas Shadle in yesterday's New York Times.

A couple of years ago I made a transcription of Price's Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the Life of a Washerwoman for string quartet that I know has been performed here and there (I know of performances in Australia and New Zealand), but I have never had the chance to hear it played either live or recorded by a good string quartet.

So I'm taking the celebration of Florence Price's 135th birthday to share the link to the music here. I found the piano music in the IMSLP, so I put my string quartet transcription (I transposed it up a semitone from the original) there as well.

The score and parts are available on this page of the IMSLP, and you can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Karen Walwyn Plays Florence Price's Piano Music

For much of her professional career, the pianist Karen Walwyn has been a champion of Florence Price's piano music. Thanks to the windfall discovery in 2009 of a large number of Price's unpublished manuscripts, found during the renovation of a house in St. Anne, Illinois, where the Price family lived during the final years of Florence's life, Walwyn has a great deal more of Price's music to learn, perform, and record. Michael Cooper has been engraving and editing this musical cache for G. Schirmer (a project that will take many more years), and Walwyn has started recording the music.

This first Walwyn recording of Price's solo piano music includes the E minor Piano Sonata, a piece that won a well-deserved prize in the 1932 Wanamaker Competition. It was not published during Price's lifetime, and only after a great deal of work by Price's biographer Rae Linda Brown, did G. Schirmer publish the Sonata in 1997. The Sonata is one of Price's best known and most often recorded solo piano pieces. My hope is that Walwyn's superb recording will inspire many more performances and recordings of it, not because Florence Price was an African American woman, but because in this work she combines a complete mastery of the European formal tradition with a unique and deeply expressive musical voice. It is, in many ways, the kind of American voice that Antonín Dvořák might have been thinking about in an 1895 article he wrote for Harper's Magazine, though he probably hadn't imagined that voice as being the voice of a woman:

A while ago I suggested that inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the Negro melodies or Indian chants. I was led to take this view partly by the fact that the so-called plantation songs are indeed the most striking and appealing melodies that have yet been found on this side of the water, but largely by the observation that this seems to be recognized, though often unconsciously, by most Americans. All races have their distinctively national songs, which they at once recognize as their own, even if they have never heard them before. When a Tcech [sic], a Pole, or a Magyar in this country suddenly hears one of his folk-songs or dances, no matter if it is for the first time in his life, his eyes light up at once, and his heart within him responds, and claims that music as his own. So it is with those of Teutonic or Celtic blood, or any other men, indeed, whose first lullaby mayhap [perhaps] was a song wrung from the heart of the people.

It is a proper question to ask, what songs, then, belong to the American and appeal more strongly to him than any others? What melody could stop him on the street if he were in a strange land and make the home feeling well up within him, no matter how hardened he might be or how wretchedly the tune were played? Their number, to be sure, seems to be limited. The most potent as well as the most beautiful among them, according to my estimation, are certain of the so-called plantation melodies and slave songs, all of which are distinguished by unusual and subtle harmonies, the like of which I have found in no other songs but those of old Scotland and Ireland. The point has been urged that many of these touching songs, like those of Foster, have not been composed by the Negroes themselves, but are the work of white men, while others did not originate on the plantations, but were imported from Africa. It seems to me that this matters but little. One might as well condemn the Hungarian Rhapsody because Liszt could not speak Hungarian. The important thing is that the inspiration for such music should come from the right source, and that the music itself should be a true expression of the people's real feelings.

The CD begins with Price's set of five Preludes that Price wrot between 1926 and 1932. Like Chopin in his Preludes, Price and a knack of drawing out the most personal expression from pianists, and I imagine that, like Chopin, she wrote these Preludes with a pianist's enjoyment in mind. Karen Walwyn's masterful performance of these pieces is a great pleasure to hear, and I trust that after hearing this recording pianists everywhere will want to play them. And they are far more technically accesesible than Chopin, or even Gershwin.

Price's "In the Land O'Cotton Suite," from around 1926, was among the first of her published pieces that used images from agrarian life in the Southern states (often with a rose-colored vantage point describing daily tasks from the lives of enslaved ancestors). This suite began Price's relationship with several Northern publishing companies, and paved the way for her to leave her native Little Rock, Arkansas for Chicago, where she spent the remainder of her career.

During the 1920s and 1930s Price wrote a great deal of music for teaching, and she had relationships with many important publishers (including G. Schirmer, Carl Fisher, Theodore Presser, and Authur P. Schmidt). "Joy in June" is a lovely example of one of these teaching pieces. "Child Asleep" from 1932 has only recently been published. Price wrote it on her daughter Florence Louise's fifteenth birthday.

I love hearing Price's piano music. People seem to measure a composer's success by their orchestral music (in Price's time and in the twenty-first century). Florence Price is often introduced as the first African American woman to have a piece performed by a major American orchestra, and just recently has been honored by the Grammy Award that the Philadelphia Orchestra received for their recording two of her Symphonies. But hearing her solo piano music, music written in her true musical "mother tongue," played with such expressive love and musical intelligence, provides the real measure for me of Florence Price's tremendous musical value.

You can get a copy of the CD here. 

"The fine art of growing roses in concrete" in honor of Florence Price Day

If you are still skeptical about the current Florence Price "boom," give this eight-minute-long piano concerto eight minutes of your time. The New Black Music Repertoire Ensemble, conducted by Leslie B. Dunner made this recording with Karen Walwyn as soloist in 2015, when Florence Price's music was known only to a relative handful of people.



As you can hear, this is deeply attractive music, where the material and the sound and textures of the piano make for an ideal and extraordinarily rich eight minutes. It is undeniably beautiful. The orchestration for this recording was made by Trevor Weston for Karen Walwyn's first performance in 2010, but now that Price's own orchestration has been found, a new recording has been made to celebrate the renaissance of this concerto in its original form (a one-movement work that is divided into three sections).

Karen Walwyn and the Arkansas Symphony, conducted by Geoffrey Robson, have made a new recording of the Concerto. Here's the press release:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (ASO) has released the world-premiere recording of groundbreaking Little Rock composer Florence Price’s own orchestration of her “Piano Concerto in One Movement.” Concert pianist Karen Walwyn joined ASO musicians and Artistic Director and Conductor Geoffrey Robson for the first commercial recording by ASO to be made available worldwide. This work was recorded at Robinson Center Performance Hall following a free community concert ASO performed in September 2021. The free concert celebrated the Little Rock community’s diverse musical traditions and kicked off a series of performances and events recognizing Florence Price’s musical legacy. The recording was released in advance of Florence Price Day, April 9, marking 135 years since her birth in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“It is our hope that this recording will contribute depth and clarity to the interpretation of Florence Price's unique music. We feel the spirit of Little Rock in her music and believe this is a significant step forward in our efforts to honor and recognize the rich musical heritage of this region,” said Robson. “We hope this recording will serve as inspiration to others who are learning about and performing the music of this very important American composer, Florence Price.”

In 1933, Price made history when her “Symphony in E Minor” had its world premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, making her the first African American woman composer to have her music performed by a major orchestra. Despite her success, her music was largely ignored by orchestras during her life and in the decades afterward because of her race and gender. During her time in Arkansas, Price lived in Little Rock’s Dunbar neighborhood. The Dunbar Historic Neighborhood Association partnered with the concert sponsor Stella Boyle Smith Trust to present the free community concert which featured Price’s work. The performance also included an outdoor livestream of the concert for residents of the Dunbar neighborhood.

“While groundbreaking in her time, many musicians and music lovers are just now discovering the catalog of Price’s music almost three generations later. Her work is not only historically important but is also truly inspired music that has the power to move hearts and minds today,” said Michael Mayton, trustee of the Stella Boyle Smith Trust. “It has been an honor to play a role in bringing the music of Florence Price to the forefront, celebrate her contributions and help inspire the next generation of musicians and composers.”

“When I reflect on the life of Florence Price, I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who urged us to live as if we have a future no matter how many challenges and trials we encounter. In spite of spirit killing personal and professional disappointments and betrayals, Florence Price continued to compose exquisite music,” said Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton, former president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, inductee into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and Life Member of the ASO Board of Directors. “The fact that this music was little known and rarely acknowledged during Price's lifetime did not stop the quest for excellence. Florence Price had hope because she believed her work had meaning and purpose. Florence Price has given me the gift of soul satisfying music and an example of the fine art of growing roses in concrete.”

Here's a link to the ASO webpage about the recording, which includes the names of the musicians in the orchestra, and has a huge list of streaming services where the recording will be available.

Queens for a Day: Viola Day in Queens with Adoration

My six-viola arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration" comes about three-quarters of the way into this multi-viola program.

One more transcription of Florence Price's Adoration

Sheronda Shorter, the director of the Kentuckiana Viola Choir asked me to make a multi-viola transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration." I thought I would share it here for other multi-viola ensembles to play. You can find a PDF of the score and parts here as well as on this page of the IMSLP.

Viola or Cello Adoration

My violin and piano transcription of Florence Price's Adoration can certainly be played on the viola or the cello, but it is far more viola-or-cello-friendly when transposed down a whole step to C major. Hannah Barton and Michael Finlay put a beautiful video of this version played on viola that I would like to share here.

You can find the viola part here, and the piano score (with the cello part) here.

This Pandemic August vs. Last Pandemic August

Last August it felt like we were all in this together. "This" meaning, for musicians like me, that none of us, no matter where in the world we lived, were playing concerts. Some of us, used the time to develop more technique, write music for people who were in need of ways of connecting to others, and make amazing videos answering burning questions about the "how" and "why" of violin playing (like Augustin Hadelich).

I was incredibly productive (that link goes to the pieces in my catalog from 2020, minus a bunch of pieces not listed that are still awaiting premieres or publication), and incredibly fortunate, because there were people all over the world posting videos of the solo pieces I wrote, as well as posting videos of pieces I wrote for two or more instruments (some assembled remotely, and some made with real-time partners at home). It did help me feel unusually connected to the musical world outside of my town, my area, and my country.

There was also, in the absence of concerts to play, perhaps, a hightened awareness of how blatant and omnipresence in American society racism is, which propelled a great many musicians into learning about how non-racially-diverse the usual "classical" repertoire is, and how few women have music that makes its way into orchestral concert programs. I got to see stabs at remedying this problem. In July I started learning about performances of my string orchestra transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration," and new performance videos continued through the remainder of the academic year. It was tremendously exciting.

Things are different this August. Vaccinated people are playing concerts again. Most of the musicians I know in the world outside of our area of downstate Illinois are vaccinated, and they are able to engage in performances for a masked and vaccinated audience. The Delta variant of Covid is frightening, but we do know that being vaccinated and wearing masks when sharing indoor air with people who may or may not be vaccinated will keep us safe until it is time for a booster.

While the rest of the musical world is getting on with their lives as usual, and living their musical lives less online (which is certainly a good thing), I am feeling more and more like a remote and forgotten composer. I suppose that is the way of the world. I'm proud of the work I have done, and I'm proud to have made my music so easily accessible, but composers are now kind of a dime a dozen in these musical internets, and I'm starting to understand that composers who are female may have had a brief moment of acceptability during this past year, but musicians (of all stripes) will more than likely default to thinking of composers to take seriously as being men. I'm not the squeakiest of wheels. I do what I can, but it is not in my nature to promote myself like many other living composers.

And now, here in "Covid," Illinois, where only a third of the population of our county is vaccinated, and only half of the people I see in the grocery store wear masks, there are big spikes in cases (don't get me started on our US representative--the 15th district of Illinois for the curious--I don't want to sully this blog with her name or even a link to her). Coles County has the same daily average that we had last August, before we had vaccines available.

I'm sorry to have made such a lousy post, but there isn't that much that can offset the general lousiness of this particular time for me.

Florence Price's "Thumbnail Sketches" now for string quartet

A few months ago I was looking at Florence Price's "Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the Life of a Washerwoman," a piece she wrote for piano, and I noticed that if I transposed up a half step it would work really well for string quartet.

The score and parts for my string quartet transcription are now available on this page of the IMSLP, and you can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Please read what Michael Cooper has to say about this piece and this transcription. His post also has links to performances of three of the movements of the piece by pianist Kevin Wayne Bumpers.

Celebrating Juneteenth with Marian Anderson and Florence Price

This is the arrangement of "My Soul's Been Anchored in de Lord" that Florence Price made for her friend Marian Anderson:

Price “Adoration” on Tuba!

It's so great that Cristina Cutts Dougherty, my new favorite tuba player, was able to use my transcription for flute and piano to play "Adoration" on Tuba! Sometimes it feels like this piece has grown into a "super organ" piece, with magnificent options for registration that Florence Price, as an organst, might have only dreamed about. And every performance is different, which serves as a constant reminder that as a composer (and arranger) I only play a small part in the whole dance of music making.



I only wish I knew where and when she wrote the piece. It was first published in 1951, and the copyright wasn't renewed. In short it was forgotten. Thank goodness the Sibley library entered it (along with their other public domain holdings) into the IMSLP, or it could have had a fate like "To A Wild Rose," if Marian MacDowell, according to legend, hadn't it fished out of her husband's wastebasket.

While I'm thinking about it, let me recommend The Heart of a Woman, Rae Linda Brown's new biography of Florence Price, which my husband gave me as a birthday present, and I am currently reading. I first learned about Florence Price from an article Rae Linda Brown wrote for an issue of the Maud Powell Signature, which she expanded into this excellent biography. The only thing that seems to be missing from the book is any reference to "Adoration"!

Dr. Brown is no longer alive. I bet she would love all the attention that "Adoration" is getting, even if she didn't know about the piece. Maybe some dedicated scholar will pick up Rae Linda Brown's trail, and maybe some day we will know a little more about "Adoration."

My transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration" on Decca!

What a surprise to find that Randall Goosby is including my 2013 violin and piano arrangement (at least the violin part) of Florence Price's "Adoration" on his forthcoming premiere recording (being released on June 25th) with Decca. He is a terrific violinist and certainly has a bright career ahead of him. Goosby is presenting "Adoration" here as a "calling card" for the larger recording.

Adoring Florence Price's "Adoration" in Modesto, California

Michael Cooper's work on Florence Price

Michael Cooper's article, "The Problem with Programs Part 2," (the second of a three-part series) is so very interesting. Why is the overture for a concert given as part of a celebration of "A Century of Progress" at the Chicago World's Fair by John Powell?

[from Wikipedia] Powell became a world-renowned composer.He had a racialist approach to music, which he expressed in his writings. He was interested in Appalachian folk music and championed its performance and preservation. He was one of the founders of the White Top Folk Festival, held in Grayson County, Virginia annually from 1931 to 1939.

Powell's ideology—and musicology—were strongly racialist and anti-black, a topic which served as the subject for many of his essays.[In the fall of 1922 together with Earnest Sevier Cox (a self-proclaimed ethnologist and explorer) and Dr. Walter Plecker, Powell founded the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in Richmond, Virginia. They worked closely with Walter Ashby Plecker to promote state legislation to classify people simply as "white" or "negro", and to end "amalgamation" of the races by intermarriage. The activities of the club split the elite in Virginia, which had tried to take pride in its "genteel paternalism" in controlling racial relations. The clubs attracted more racists.

Within a year, more than 400 white men had joined as members and the club had 31 "posts" in Virginia, including two in Charlottesville, one for the town and one at the University of Virginia. Powell worked with Dr. Plecker, the state's registrar of statistics, to draft the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The club members were successful in lobbying the legislature to gain passage of the act, which classified as black any person with any African ancestry, although the previous law recognized persons with one-sixteenth or less black ancestry as white.

Michael Cooper (this link goes to his blog) has done the extraordinary work of preparing a motherlode of newly-discovered work by Florence Price for publication by G. Schirmer, and leading the way (clearing the way) for a better, and indeed more diverse, musical future for concerts that include early 20th-century music. The tagline on his home page is, "Helping to make unheard music part of our world."

I did, by the way, have a glance at some of Powell's music in the IMSLP. He wrote a nostalgic violin and piano sonata that reflects on the "charms" of old Virginia. It actually looks like a nice piece. But I'm not going to play it. I'm not even going to download the PDF to my computer. Feh.

You can read the first part of Michael Cooper's series here.

Adoration in Memphis

What a great emotional experience it was to hear the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra my brother Marshall played in for most of his career, play my arrangement of Florence Price's "Adoration" to open their first concert after a year of silence due to Covid. You can listen to the concert here. The "Adoration" begins about 13 minutes in, after a stellar "Star-spangled Banner" played by the concertmaster.

"Adoration" performed by violinist Laura Colgate and pianist Elizabeth Hill

I love hearing the different ways that people play my transcription of Florence Price's "Adoration," and was particularly moved by this recording. What a thrill it is to have this piece chosen by the National Philharmonic to celebrate the begininning of this year's Women's History Month.