Symphony No. 3 in c minor

• Price composed this symphony in 1940.¹ It premiered the same year in a performance by the Detroit Civic Orchestra, under the baton of Valter Poole.²
  • In this concert, Florence Price also appeared as piano soloist in her own Concerto in One Movement (1934).³ 
  • The Detroit Civic Orchestra was a part of Michigan’s Works Progress Administration Federal Music Project. The WPA provided new opportunities for many African-American composers and classical musicians in the 1930s, including Florence Price.⁴

“Mrs. Price, both in the concerto and in the symphony, spoke in the musical idiom of her own people, and spoke with authority. There was inherent in both works all the emotional warmth of the American Negro, so that the evening became one of profound melody satisfaction. In the symphony there was a slow movement of majestic beauty, a third in which the rhythmic preference of the Negro found scope in a series of dance forms, and a finale which swept forward with great vigor.” 

Review by J.D. Callahan in the Detroit Free Press, November 7, 1940.⁵

• In the place of the traditional symphonic third-movement scherzo or minuet, Price opted for an African-American vernacular dance form for her symphony’s third movement: Juba. 

• Eleanor Roosevelt was present for a rehearsal of Price’s 3^rd Symphony in Detroit, and she went on to write an article describing the experience, and praising Price and the Detroit Civic Orchestra.  Price wrote to the First Lady in gratitude for the mention.⁶

[Describing the rehearsal, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that she heard]“a full symphony orchestra, the fourth best WPA orchestra in the country. They played two movements in a new symphony by Florence Price, one of the few women to write symphonic music. She is a colored woman and native of Chicago, who has certainly made a contribution to our music. The orchestra rendered her symphony beautifully..”

Eleanor Roosevelt⁷

1. Rae Linda Brown, “Price [née Smith], Florence Bea(trice),” Grove Music Online (March 30, 2020), accessed June 8, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-90000367402. 
2. “Florence Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minor,” Wise Music Classical, accessed June 8, 2021, https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/58894/Symphony-No-3-in-C-minor–Florence-Price/.  
3. Rae Linda Brown, “Lifting the Veil: The Symphonies of Florence B. Price,” in Florence Price, Symphonies nos. 1 and 3, ed. Rae Linda Brown and Wayne D. Shirley (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2008), xlvii.
4. Ibid.
5. Quoted in Ibid., xlviii.
6. Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), ebook.
7. Quoted in Ibid.