Music Institute Will Spotlight Composer Florence Price
The event is on Friday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m.
By: Stephi Wild Mar. 28, 2025
The Music Institute of Chicago's “One Composer, One Community,” which focuses on the life and music of a single, under-represented composer during the course of an academic year, is featuring the late composer Florence Price. The initiative culminates with community activities and a concert on Friday, May 2.
Poet, national spoken word artist, and motivational speaker K-Love presents a Music Institute-commissioned world premiere piece paying tribute to Price at Haven Middle School in Evanston, where she will work with students in a variety of workshops.
At 7:30 p.m. at Nichols Concert Hall, a free public concert features K-Love performing her tribute along with Music Institute faculty and students performing Price's music and more. Delivering remarks at the event is Dr. Traci Lombré, a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist specializing in Kansas City and Chicago Black musical culture, performance, and pedagogy. She is a member of Michigan's Singing Justice Collective, which embraces divergent experiences of race, ethnicity, class background, academic rank, gender, and religion to investigate themes in Black American music.
In February, the Music Institute hosted a professional development panel for Music Institute faculty and invited members of the Chicago Consortium of Community Music Schools. The panel featured world-class scholars and interpreters of Price's work, including Dr. Samantha Ege, award-winning researcher and musicologist and internationally recognized concert pianist; Dr. Louise Toppin, critically acclaimed operatic, orchestral, and oratorio performer and scholar on the music of African American composers; and Rachel Barton Pine, American violinist and Music Institute alum whose recording Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries: 25th Anniversary Edition features Price's Violin Concerto No. 2 (2022). Florence Price was the first African-American woman whose music was performed by a major symphony orchestra—the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. Her music combines the European classical tradition, in which she was trained, and the haunting melodies of African-American spirituals and folk tunes.
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