Florence Price

CTL-E-6044 · Person · musician · 1887-1953

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07267 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6044.

Florence Beatrice Price, born April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, was a composer, pianist, organist, and teacher trained at the New England Conservatory, one of the few such schools then admitting Black students, where she earned diplomas in organ and piano teaching. After teaching in Arkansas and heading the music department at Clark University in Atlanta, she returned to Little Rock, married, and raised a family as racial violence intensified around her. In 1927, following a lynching in Little Rock, she moved to Chicago, and there her composing deepened into large forms. Her Symphony No. 1 in E minor won first prize in the 1932 Wanamaker competition, and on June 15, 1933, Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered it, making Price the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. Her music joins European Romantic practice to spirituals, call-and-response, and the juba dance. She wrote more than 300 works, many unpublished at her death in Chicago on June 3, 1953; manuscripts rediscovered in 2009 in her former summer home have driven a major revival.

The record

• Also known as: Florence Beatrice Price, Florence B. Price, Florence Beatrice Smith Price

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 3 — 747 Program, Wave 10; third Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Florence Price entity in the live graph at 3,683 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-6044 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche, ranks #1401–#2050 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1906). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — Chicago classical-music core scope: a Great Migration composer whose defining premiere happened in Chicago with the city's orchestra, and whose papers and revival are tied to the region. Vital status: DECEASED — died June 3, 1953, in Chicago (Cedille Records; NPR concurs on 1953). Tribute treatment in the Curator's Judgment. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Output: more than 300 works (Cedille Records). Wanamaker prize for the symphony: $500 first prize (Wikipedia, Symphony No. 1). CONFLICT SHOWN, NOT BLENDED: one reference account in the Handy African American History Answer Book gives her birth year as 1888 and birthplace as Camden, New Jersey, against April 9, 1887, Little Rock in NPR, Cedille, and the Gulf Coast Symphony account; CTL follows 1887, Little Rock, and records the outlier rather than blending it. MEDIA: photo HELD (Florence Price portrait photograph, Chicago years (the undated portrait used in reference accounts) — named candidate only; file-level verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6044-florence-price.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map (checked by name and variants; see SHORTS_E), and no embed) | audio = HELD (No audiobook excerpt or author recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)

Sources

• NPR Illinois, Revisiting the Pioneering Composer Florence Price (January 21, 2019; accessed 2026-10-16) — the 1933 Chicago Symphony premiere as the first performance of a work by an African American woman by a major orchestra, 1887 Little Rock birth, New England Conservatory study, the 1927 move to Chicago after a lynching, the prize that drew Frederick Stock, the 1953 death, and the roughly 30 boxes of manuscripts including some 200 compositions found at her former summer home — https://www.nprillinois.org/generationlisten/2019-01-21/revisiting-the-pioneering-composer-florence-price (primary source · build store)
• Cedille Records, Florence Price, artist biography (accessed 2026-10-16) — Chicago classical label's account: 1887-1953 life, first African American woman recognized as a symphonic composer, the June 15, 1933 Symphony in E Minor premiere under Stock, the 1927 Great Migration move to Chicago, more than 300 works, and her spiritual arrangements sung by Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price — https://www.cedillerecords.org/artists/florence-price/ (build store)
• Wikipedia, Symphony No. 1 (Price) (accessed 2026-10-16) — symphony completed in 1932, the February 1932 Wanamaker entry and $500 first prize, and the June 15, 1933 Chicago Symphony premiere at the Auditorium Theatre — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_(Price) (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6044 · Combined Graph record U-07267 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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