The women who made Florence Price

Classical music, like so many art forms, requires two conditions: a steady flow of capital and preserving belief in the existence of singular, anachronistic genius.

As scholar-pianist Samantha Ege makes clear in South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene, Florence Price is no exception. Price is now widely recognized as the first Black woman to have had a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, at a 1933 Chicago Symphony concert associated with that year’s World’s Fair. (Twenty-year-old Margaret Bonds, who would become a well-known composer in her own right, performed as the evening’s soloist.) While predominantly white musical institutions have opted for a tidy narrative of “rediscovery,” in truth, Price’s legacy has always been safeguarded locally and among the Black musical cognoscenti. A public school at 44th and Drexel bore her name from 1964 until 2012, when it became a casualty of the Rahm-era school closures. Her music has been recorded since at least the 1980s; an ensemble associated with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago recorded her Symphony No. 1 in E minor as long ago as 2011, the same year Florence B. Price Elementary was condemned to closure.

But South Side Impresarios stresses Price and her peers—like Bonds and Nora Holt, a music critic and impresario who became the first African American in the country to receive a master’s degree in music—were almost certainly not the only composers of their race, gender, and time with the ability and aspiration to write symphonic music. “I reject a reading of [Price’s] path that fixates on her exceptionalism,” Ege writes.

Price and others were, however, lucky enough to be championed by an influential community of upper- and upper-middle-class south-siders who rallied around them and their music. In Chicago, that impresario class was, uniquely, dominated by women. This was a milieu where a woman (Marjorie Stewart Joyner, a businesswoman and longtime Bud Billiken Parade organizer) could have a fighting chance to be elected “mayor” of Bronzeville in 1936, in the neighborhood’s honorary elections. Ege makes it clear that these “Race women”—Ege uses the contemporaneous term to capture their elite status and social goals—were as essential to Price, Bonds, and Holt’s productivity as the Esterházys were to Haydn or Nadezhda von Meck was to Tchaikovsky. Sometimes it was through fundraising muscle; sometimes it was as profound as offering housing and companionship, as Bonds’s family did to Price and her children after she escaped an unhappy marriage.

Chicago’s “Race women” offered an alternative to white institutional support for Black art, which was nonexistent, fleeting, or excruciatingly double-edged. For all the ink spilled about the Chicago Symphony’s 1933 concert, Ege reminds readers that it opened with an overture by John Powell, a white supremacist who influenced the passage of a statute outlawing interracial marriage in Virginia. (The law wouldn’t be overturned until the passage of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. That story, by the way, is being adapted into an opera this spring by the Chicago-based composer Damien Geter.)

That these “Race women” have not been given their due illuminates how quickly a Price hagiography is being crafted before our very eyes, like so many composers before her. Until now, little (written) credit has been afforded the patron who underwrote that 1933 Chicago Symphony concert: Maude Roberts George. A retired soprano, George succeeded Holt both as staff music critic of the Defender and as the chair of the National Association of Negro Musicians—an organization whose inaugural convention was held, impossibly, during the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. Both women used those posts to rally community support for Black classical artists in Chicago and beyond. Ege imagines Holt may have been the one who introduced Price to her south-side base, perhaps even responding to Holt’s open invitation to her home via her Defender columns.

A word before you read: South Side Impresarios is an academic text. Ege’s book levies a social analysis, rather than attempting a narrative biography. (For that, try instead the late Rae Linda Brown’s The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, published in 2020 by the same press.) That’s despite Ege’s obvious knack for potent, vivifying description, which blooms in the book’s introduction and conclusion but mostly peters out in its main body. Her introduction transports us to the 1933 World’s Fair concert, then to her own trip to the Chicago Symphony, 84 years later. There, she describes, with fond acuity, the Chicago women who carry the torch Price, Bonds, Holt, George, and others ignited all those years ago: composers Renée C. Baker, Regina Harris Baiocchi, and Jessie Montgomery, the last of whom became only the second Black woman to have her music played by the Chicago Symphony while in residence at the orchestra from 2021 to 2024; Chicago Symphony African American Network (AAN) founder Sheila Anne Dawson-Jones; and music critic and AAN ambassador Barbara Wright-Pryor. Ege’s conclusion is cast as a heartfelt second-person address to Maude Roberts George herself, musing on her life and legacy. The effect is so immediate that when Ege reveals the brutal reality of George’s final years—she suffered a nearly fatal bullet wound in her own home, under circumstances that remain foggy—the reader, too, feels their feet swept out from under them.

But Ege’s general disinclination toward a narrative mode feels like a missed opportunity. Resisting hagiography also means emphasizing the humanity of great individuals; South Side Impresarios readers will leave with a comprehensive account of the networks and circumstances that made these composers’ rise possible but not necessarily with any stronger sense of them as people.

Ege beautifully renders the few exceptions to that rule. One which still sticks is her telling of a 1971 interview with Bonds, in which the composer, by then very ill, recalls Black musicians gathering to help copy out instrumental parts for Price on short notice. Why? Bonds apparently crumbles into laughter on this point in the recorded interview: “She seemed to procrastinate.”

Yes, the thought that even the great Florence Price blew a deadline once in a while is humbling. More than that, though, the scene presents a different, more communal vision of philanthropy. It’s a vision underrated in classical music’s past but almost certainly necessary for its future survival: many hands of many colors lifting in unison, rather than the white and white-gloved few.

South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege
University of Illinois Press, paperback, 296 pp., $24.95, press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088339