The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price

“A fascinating study of an overlooked Chicagoan, the first African American woman to have a musical composition played by a major orchestra, and the early stages of black feminism.” — Chicago Magazine

The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works.

Price’s 25 years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create 300 works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price’s major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching and her struggles with racism, poverty and professional jealousies.

Rae Linda Brown was a processor at the University of Michigan and a professor and Robert and Marjorie Rawlins Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She was the author of Music, Printed and Manuscript, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters: An Annotated Catalog. She died in 2017.

Author: Rae Linda Brown
Format: Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: University of Illinois Press (2020)
ISBN: 9780252085109