The Aesthetics of Florence Price: Negotiating the Dissonances of a New World Nationalism

As an African-American woman, Florence Price (1887–1953) embodied the antithesis of Eurocentric American creative thought in the first half of the twentieth century. As a practitioner who synthesized black musical idioms and classical conventions in pursuit of a distinctly American school of music, her compositional voice clashed against an aesthetic that rendered whiteness and maleness as the absolute signifiers of citizenship and, therefore, a national school. Price had little choice but to negotiate the dissonances of race and gender and, as a result, these negotiations are inherent in her compositional outlook and performance contexts. “The Aesthetics of Florence Price: Negotiating the Dissonances of a New World Nationalism” presents a historical narrative that foregrounds the junctions at which Price’s artistic, intellectual, and cultural callings converged. Focusing on the formative years and key works that led to Price’s national recognition as a composer, I largely engage her life and musical activity after her 1927 arrival in Chicago. Through the lens of a pianist, I present an analysis and interpretation that theorizes Price’s negotiations of cultural dissonances in the score and I suggest possibilities for realization in performance. This culminates in a study that examines the path to Price’s resolution of Old and New World ideals amid African retentions in her aesthetic.