Austin Symphonic Band Performing Adoration

Austin Symphonic Band ( https://austinsymphonicband.org/ ). April 13, 2025. ASB performing Adoration by Florence B. Price (trans. Cheldon R. Williams). [NOTE: Click 'more' to read the program notes.] Music Director Dr. Kyle R. Glaser conducting. "Celebration" concert at the Connally HS Performing Arts Center in Austin, TX.

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Video and Sound Production: Eddie Jennings

From the program notes written by David Cross:

Adoration (1951)
Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
Transcribed by Cheldon R. Williams

Program Note by Michael-Thomas Foumai:

With the re-discovery of Florence Price’s music in 2009, Price’s legacy in the form of manuscripts, letters, and personal items were uncovered in her abandoned summer home on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois. Her life, heavily researched by the musicologist Douglas Shadle, revealed a prolific composer of keyboard, chamber, and orchestral works, including two violin concertos, a teacher, mother, and an active participant in the National Association for Negro Musicians (NANM) and the National Federation of Music Clubs.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was one of three children in a bi-racial family. Her father was the only African-American dentist in the city and her mother was a local music teacher. By all accounts, the family was well respected within the community. Florence began her music studies with her mother, giving her first piano recital at age four and publishing her first composition by age 11. She graduated as valedictorian from her local Catholic school at age 14. A year later, in 1902, she moved to Boston to enroll at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pursued a double major in organ and piano teaching. She graduated with honors in 1906, and with an artist diploma as well as a teaching certificate. She was only 19 at the time. She returned to Arkansas in 1910 before moving to Atlanta, where she took a job as head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University, an historically Black college. Two years later, she married attorney Thomas J. Price, gave up her job, and moved back to Little Rock, where her husband practiced law and she raised their two daughters. By this time, however, Jim Crow laws had consumed the region and Little Rock was racially segregated. Any advantages she had enjoyed years before no longer existed; she was not able to find meaningful work of any kind in the area.

Price faced many challenges to carve out a career amongst the mostly white male titans of the day. Writing to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky in 1943, she would introduce herself as: “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.” Her work, mainly in the romantic style,
Florence B. Price would be neglected by many, including Koussevitzky, but she persevered. The performance of her Symphony in E-minor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 is the first time any major orchestra had performed music composed by an African American woman.

Composed two years before her death, Price’s Adoration is originally for organ and is arranged for solo violin and strings by Jim Gray. As the title suggests, the brief 3-minute work channels a sacred devotion common with liturgical hymnody.

Listen for:
• A slowly-developing, beautifully-simple lullaby