Florence Price and Marion Anderson

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1887, Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She would grow up to be the first African-American woman to win widespread recognition as a symphonic composer. All that happened under her married name: Florence Price.

Price studied at the New England Conservatory, with the noted American composers Frederick Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick, but settled in Chicago. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony. In 1940, her Third Symphony premiered in Detroit, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Detroit that week, was so impressed by a rehearsal of Price’s symphony that she altered her schedule to stay for that evening’s performance, and even wrote about it in her newspaper column, “My Day.”

And speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, on today’s date in 1939, which fell on Easter Sunday that year, the First Lady and then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes arranged for the famous African-American contralto, Marion Anderson, to perform a free, open-air recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 75,000 people attended. Marion Anderson admired Florence Price’s work, and sang some of Florence Price’s songs, including Songs to the Dark Virgin, a setting of a text by Langston Hughes.

Music Played in Today's Program

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) Symphony No. 3 The Women's Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor. Koch 7518

On This Day

Births

• 1717 - Austrian composer Georg Matthias Monn, in Vienna;

• 1846 - Italian-born British composer and vocal teacher Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti, in Ortona;

• 1887 - American composer Florence Price, in Little Rock, Ark.;

• 1906 - Hungarian-born American composer and conductor Antal Dorati, in Budapest;

• 1935 - Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen, in Salmi;

Deaths

• 1933 - German composer and organist Sigfrid Karg-Elert, age 55, in Leipzig;

• 1960 - Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin, age 66, in London;

Premieres

• 1903 - Frederick S. Converse: "Endymion's Narrative" for orchestra, by the Boston Symphony, Wilhelm Gericke conducting;

• 1916 - de Falla: "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" for piano and orchestra, in Madrid;

• 1920 - Stenhammar: incidental music for Shakespeare's "As You Like It," at the Lorensberg Theater in Gothenburg, Sweden;

• 1926 - Varèse: "Amériques," by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting;

• 1942 - Stravinsky: "Circus Polka" at Madison Square Gardens in New York, by the Barnum & Bailey Circus, with M. Evans conducting;

• 1948 - Barber: song-cycle "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" for voice and orchestra, by the Boston Symphony with Serge Koussevitzky conducting and soprano Eleanor Steber the soloist;

• 1959 - Benjamin Lees: "Prologue, Capriccio and Epilogue" for orchestra, in Portland, Ore.;

• 1967 - Ned Rorem: "Water Music"for clarinet, violin and orchestra, by the Youth Chamber Orchestra of Oakland, with Robert Hughes conducting and Larry London (clarinet) and Thomas Halpin (violin) the soloists;

Others

• 1870 - Grieg writes a letter from Rome describing how Franz Liszt performed his Piano Concerto at sight and praised the work highly;

• 1938 - American premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 by the NBC Symphony, Artur Rodzinski conducting;

• 1939 - First lady Eleanor Roosevelt sponsors an Easter Sunday concert by Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial to protest racial discrimination after the singer is denied use of Washington's Constitution Hall (owned and administered by the Daughters of the American Revolution); Some 75,000 people attend this open-air event.