In 2009, numerous manuscripts, previously thought to be lost, were rediscovered in what was once Florence Price’s summer home. The rediscovery narrative that followed, especially in white mainstream media discourse in the United States, focused more on the rediscovery of Price herself, rather than on the rediscovery of her manuscripts. Not only did this distort Price’s meaning to a modern-day, mainstream audience; it also erased the scholarly and archival efforts of practitioners, which can be dated back to the era of Price’s activity. Black classical communities in the United States kept Price’s musical legacy alive through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This chapter therefore asks: How do we listen to Price today? The Price archives, the narratives of community embedded in her musical manuscripts, and the ensuing recovery work emerge as important factors in this new era of Price scholarship.

Florence Price’s contributions to the keyboard literature range from pedagogical works for beginners, many of which she composed for her own students, to expansive multi-movement pieces that were written with the concert musician in mind. In addition to their varying levels of difficulty, variety also comes in the form of their stylistic influences. African American folk idioms are prevalent, as are the sound worlds of nineteenth century Romanticism and early twentieth-century chromatic experimentalism. As this chapter shows, Price’s keyboard music additionally sheds light on the influence of the publishing industry and the market for these works. Ultimately, however, Price’s keyboard output provides a window into her impetus as an educator and composer, and reveals Price the pianist and organist who frequently programmed her unpublished works in her own recitals and played for pleasure.

Florence Price’s music expands the conversation around what musical analysis means for composers on the canonical fringes who draw upon influences outside a Western art music framework. This chapter recognizes the limitations of conventional Western music analysis in studies of Price’s music and suggests other modes of analytic inquiry that actively engage with interdisciplinary and intersectional resources. This chapter asks: What would it mean to hear and analyze Florence Price’s music intersectionally? What follows are case studies around select art songs that exemplify modes of assessing her compositions with serious analytical nuance, as well as hearing music through and with the composer. In addition to exploring greater possibilities for the analysis of Price’s music, this chapter confronts the detrimental impact of the exceptionalist narrative in discussions of her compositional ideas, stylistic sources, and career trajectory.

“My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (1937) is one of Price’s most well-known concert spirituals due to Marian Anderson’s historic performance of the piece on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Its continued inclusion in programs, especially by African American concert singers (such as Leontyne Price and Roberta Alexander, for example), has helped secure the work as an important contribution to the repertory of American art song. However, the song’s significance extends beyond its high-profile performances and sheds light on the significant legacy of the concert spiritual genre. This chapter’s analysis of several concert spirituals by Price reflects her embrace of and impact on this genre’s conventions and musical legacy.

The late Rae Linda Brown was instrumental in taking Florence Price scholarship to new heights. She worked as part of a dedicated cohort of Price scholars and performers (such as Mildred Denby Green, Barbara Garvey Jackson, and Althea Waites) to bring the life and music of Price to wider audiences, in and outside of academia. This chapter positions Brown as an important link between the earlier efforts of New Negro era musicologists who documented Price’s outputs during the composer’s lifetime, the post–civil rights era musicologists who contextualized Price and her contemporaries in a deeper social history of Black American music, and the twenty-first-century interventions as represented in this companion. This chapter delves into Brown’s journey to tell Price’s story, encompassing her first encounters with Price’s music as a student at Yale and her monumental efforts to subsequently archive, publish, and publicize the details of Price’s groundbreaking story. In this chapter, the centrality of several library collections, including those at the University of Arkansas, come to the fore.

What does it look like for new research to remain in dialogue with the past; to express evolving knowledge in a creative duet with the intellectual genealogies undergirding these paths; to evince a melting pot of inspiration over siloed discourses? These are the questions that guide this introductory chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price. Beginning with the story of Price’s plea for her music to have an audience with the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky and segueing into the deeper history of Black classical music community building in which Price’s music and memory was upheld, this chapter lays out priorities that must inform the twenty-first-century landscape of Price scholarship.

This chapter traces Price’s stylistic development as a composer of symphonies and tone poems, with particular attention to orchestration, form, and musical narrative. The mid-century context of orchestral music performance in Chicago is also considered.

In 2003, the late Rae Linda Brown wrote a paper called “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’: Harry T. Burleigh’s Influence on Florence B. Price.” The paper was intended for a national conference called “The Heritage and Legacy of Harry T. Burleigh.” Brown’s plans to deliver the paper did not materialize, but with the permission of Brown’s sister, Carlene J. Brown, and the University of Illinois Press, Brown’s paper forms the basis of this chapter. Burleigh’s influence on Price’s art songs was profound and their correspondence reveals a mentorship model in which Burleigh’s authority (especially in his approaches to text, harmony, and vernacular idioms) was unquestionable. Price’s connection to Burleigh illuminates his position as a central figure in the wider community of early twentieth-century Black classical composers in the United States. This chapter brings greater context to the creative milieu in which Price worked.

Women’s musical networks in the United States were largely fractured along the color line. While Florence Price found acceptance within some white women’s musical organizations, a number of them were invested in white supremacy (a dynamic that was deeply rooted in the exclusionary and expedient practices of white women suffragists). Black women’s activism formed a necessary antidote to these conditions. African American women’s cultural organizing wove into the city’s Black concert scene, generating the musical sisterhood to which Price belonged. The result birthed a dynamic era of classical music-making in what came to be known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Using a Black feminist framework, this chapter examines the Black feminist bonds between Price, the Bonds family (Margaret and Estella), and Marian Anderson, while citing further individuals (e.g., Nora Holt) and institutions (e.g., the National Association of Negro Musicians) that enabled Black women to thrive in the classical music sphere.

The reawakening of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 ignited a wave of racial and social consciousness that prompted many arts-based organizations to consider the larger implications of their programmatic visions. As a composer known to, but under-programmed in, the mainstream classical music establishment, the music of Florence Price was thrust into an even greater spotlight. This chapter considers what it means to meaningfully celebrate the rediscovery of Price’s manuscripts and her revival in the mainstream. It models discourse that ensures that more African American composers are recognized and that the communities that kept names and works alive are remembered in the historical record.

This chapter illuminates the deeper history of a Black concert music tradition that undergirded Price’s path. Part of a systemic response to de jure and de facto segregation, the Black concert music tradition became not only an alternative to the white mainstream; it also presented a multifunctional use of the concert stage: a space to perform old and new repertoires and educate audiences on Black music history. The intersection of Emancipation, establishment of colleges and universities for the formerly enslaved, Jim Crow laws, the institutionalization of music education, and the rise of a Black professional class laid the foundation for the development and cultivation of a community of Black composers, performers, teachers, and patrons – a community that Price actively participated in and contributed to.

The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreign investment. The private sector was constrained by regulation. After 1991 Indian economic policy shifted sharply, deregulating and becoming more open to the global economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan moved in the same direction, but less sharply, partly because they were less statist to begin with. Other factors mattered besides government policy: the Internet boom and the service exports it facilitated; substantial remittances by migrants to the Middle East; and the protests of workers, women and other marginalized groups. In this chapter we highlight key elements of these narratives and flag the chapters that discuss them.