MVO Foreground Composer 2026/27: Florence Price

MVO’s Foreground Composer for our 2026-2027 season is Florence Price. Ms. Price studied piano pedagogy and organ performance at the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating with honors at age 19 in 1906. While at NEC she also studied composition and counterpoint with the renowned composer George Whitefield Chadwick.

Florence was born into a mixed-race family in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She regularly faced racial discrimination – during her college years she sometimes passed as Mexican to avoid discrimination against African Americans, and later as a young mother she couldn’t find work in racially-charged Little Rock. So in the 1920s, Florence and her family moved to Chicago.

In Chicago, Florence rubbed shoulders with great writers, musicians, artists and community leaders as a member of the Chicago Black Renaissance. She also began a new and fulfilling period in her compositional career there.

In 1932 Ms. Price won first prize in the Wanamaker Competition with her Symphony No.1 in E minor; it was premiered in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and as a result, she became the first female composer of African descent to have a symphonic work performed by a major national symphony orchestra. MVO performs this symphony on our April 4, 2027 concert.

After years of obscurity following her death in 1953, Price's music has seen an encouraging resurgence. Her rediscovered manuscripts and symphonies have delighted audiences worldwide, and we believe that her unique compositional voice will resonate with MVO audiences and musicians alike.

In February 2025, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in her honor. And on January 31, 2026, My Name is Florence, a Minnesota Opera New Works Initiative production, had its world premiere in Saint Paul!