Florence Price to Serge Koussevitzky
5 July 1943
Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, and by the tender age of four, guided by her mother, who was a music teacher, she had played her first piano recital. Her love of all things musical only intensified with time, and by adulthood she was immersed in the overwhelmingly white and male world of classical music. In 1933, despite her race and gender, Price made history when her piece, Symphony in E Minor, became the first composition written by an African-American woman to be played not only by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but any major orchestra. Frustratingly, this was not the norm, and Price spent much of her career proactively searching for a route through to audiences. In 1943 she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, the revered conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-five years, and asked him to consider using one of her scores. In this instance, as with many, her plea fell on deaf ears.
My dear Dr. Koussevitzky,
To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.
Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content;—until you shall have examined some of my work?
As to the handicap of race, may I relieve you by saying that I neither expect nor ask any concession on that score. I should like to be judged on merit alone—the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work (I am practically unknown in the East, except perhaps as the composer of two songs, one or the other of which Marian Anderson includes on most of her programs) to even consent to examine a score.
I confess that I am woefully lacking in the hardihood of aggression; that writing this letter to you is the result of having successfully done battle with a hounding timidity.
Having been born in the South and having spent most of my childhood there I believe I can truthfully say that I understand the real Negro music. In some of my work I make use of the idiom undiluted. Again, at other times it merely flavors my themes. And at still other times thoughts come in the garb of the other side of my mixed racial background. I have tried for practical purposes to cultivate and preserve a facility of expression in both idioms, altho I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.
Will you examine one of my scores?
Yours very sincerely,
[Signed Florence B. Price]
‘I HAVE AN UNWAVERING AND COMPELLING FAITH THAT A NATIONAL MUSIC VERY BEAUTIFUL AND VERY AMERICAN CAN COME FROM THE MELTING POT JUST AS THE NATION ITSELF HAS DONE.’
– Florence B. Price