Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher.

[2] Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953.

[8] In 1902, after high school, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts with a double major in organ and piano teaching.

[8] Initially, she passed as Mexican to avoid racial discrimination against African Americans, listing her hometown as "Pueblo, Mexico".

Like many Black families living in the Deep South, they moved north in the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow conditions, and settled in Chicago, a major industrial city.

She studied composition, orchestration, and organ with the leading teachers in the city, including Arthur Olaf Andersen, Carl Busch, Wesley La Violette, and Leo Sowerby.

[7]: 98 In 1930, an important early success occurred at the twelfth annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), when pianist-composer Margaret Bonds premiered Price's Fantasie nègre [No.

To make ends meet, she worked as an organist for silent film screenings and composed songs for radio ads under a pen name.

Early in 1933 leading Arts advocate Maude Roberts George, president of the Chicago Music Association, music critic of The Chicago Defender and eventual national president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, paid $250 (about $5,093 in 2021 dollars) for Price's First Symphony to be included in a program devoted to "The Negro in Music", with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, as part of the Century of Progress World's Fair.

[7]: 149–50 In 1934, Price represented her class at the Chicago Musical College, performing her Concerto in D minor for Piano and Orchestra as part of the 1934 commencement program.

In 1949, Price published two of her spiritual arrangements, "I Am Bound for the Kingdom", and "I'm Workin' on My Buildin'", and dedicated them to Marian Anderson, who performed them on a regular basis.

[30] In 2011, pianist Karen Walwyn and The New Black Repertory Ensemble performed Price's Concerto in One Movement and Symphony in E minor.

[33] In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in an abandoned dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, which Price had used as a summer home.

As Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, "not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration.

[37] In November 2018, the music publisher G. Schirmer announced that it had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to Florence Price's complete catalog.

[38][39] In 2021, classical pianist Lara Downes initiated a project, Rising Sun Music, to draw attention to the influence of composers from a diversity of backgrounds upon American Classical music, assisted by producers such as Adam Abeshouse, to release newly recorded works of composers such as Price and Harry Burleigh, whose importance often has been lost in historical accounts of the development in the field.

"The most substantial piece, Price’s A-minor Quintet for Piano and Strings got its first recording just last year, courtesy of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective.

Yet how happy it is that revivals do happen – and how exciting that, thanks to the advocacy of groups like the Catalysts and musicians like [Michelle] Cann, we’re seeing a deserving composer finally taking her place in the American canon.

However, even her positive reviews were influenced by the common belief of the time that many women were performers, and a woman composer was a novelty.

Despite these challenges, Price received praise for the blending of both her traditional western education and African American culture in her music, and was seen as a pioneer for both her gender and race.

[43] Even though her training was steeped in European tradition, Price's music is in an American idiom and reveals her Southern roots.

Some of her more popular works are: "Three Little Negro Dances", "Songs to the Dark Virgin", "My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord" for piano or orchestra and voice, and "Moon Bridge".

In the dance, it is a compelling, onward-sweeping force that tolerates no interruption... All phases of truly Negro activity—whether work or play, singing or praying—are more than apt to take on a rhythmic quality.