“Florence Price’s daughter, Florence Robinson, expressed similar frustrations after Price died in 1953. Artists were happy to perform Price’s arrangements of Negro spirituals, but she found no advocates for her mother’s symphonic compositions…”
Read MoreThe late Rae Linda Brown puts it succinctly: “Price tackles the issues of gender and race up-front by mentioning, then dismissing them.” In doing so, she encourages Koussevitzky to follow suit.
Read MoreEssentially, she struggled with being “caged.” Should she renounce the inclusion of Negro Spirituals in her compositional style to assimilate to a more Eurocentric view of orchestral music? Should she uphold her responsibility to “uplift the race” through the use of direct Negro Spiritual quotations in her music — something that Alain Locke believed was the key to racial uplift?
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