Fifteen Eighty Four

Samantha Ege: The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price is the book I needed when I was a student. Cambridge Companions were always my go-to during my studies because they do such a brilliant job at guiding you through the life and music of a composer. But when I learned about Florence Price, there was no companion. So this Companion is not only significant for who it represents, but for what it represents. We have needed this volume for a very long time.

My favorite thing about this Companion is the chorus of expert voices. Collaborating with friends and colleagues that I look up to was such a dream. Our authors contributed fascinating perspectives that feed into the richness of this work. I think readers will be astounded by how much cultural phenomena Price connects to, from the Philadelphia Orchestra, to the Lincoln Memorial, and even Kendrick Lamar. (You’ll have to read Minnita Daniel-Cox’s spell-binding chapter for the latter!).

A poignant moment in the process of preparing this companion came from being able to include a chapter by the pioneering Price biographer Dr. Rae Linda Brown. A few months before Dr. Brown passed away in 2017, she granted me permission to see some of her unpublished work. To include this as a chapter in the Price Companion was incredibly moving. It meant showing our readers how much Dr. Brown’s work means to us, and showing how much Dr. Brown did to make Price known today.

This Companion celebrates that important lineage; as I wrote at the end of my chapter, “a new era of Price scholarship proceeds, indebted to all that came before.”

Performance video: Fantasie Nègre No.3 in F Minor by Florence Price performed by Samantha Ege

Alexandra Kori Hill: This Companion marks the second musicological monograph on Florence Price. And in the spirit of Dr. Rae Linda Brown’s call in her landmark Price biography, this Companion dives even deeper into the cultural, social, and political significance of Price’s life, her networks, and her musical ideas.

This book isn’t only for academics, though I hope it will become a key resource for collegiate music students of all levels. If you’ve wanted to know more about Price; felt your image of classical music is incomplete; or looked through classical music encyclopedias and biographies and wondered, “Where am I?” : This book is also for you.

This Price Companion is part of a wave of recent and upcoming scholarship that highlights the vibrant world of Black classical composers, performers, and institutions. Let this be just the early stages of another seismic shift, where it’s harder to be ignorant of this history and even harder not be a part of it. Let us relish and actively seek out all the composers and repertoire we still don’t know and let us learn how diverse and dynamic classical music always has been.

The Cambridge Companion to
Florence B. Price Edited by Samantha
Ege and Alexandra Kori Hill