About this Piece

Perhaps more than any other work in her expansive catalog, Florence B. Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 captures the tragedy of her life and career. 

Born in 1887 in Little Rock, AR—in the heart of Jim Crow South—Price exhibited formidable gifts from a young age. By 15, a segregationist education system compelled her to pursue advanced musical study far away at Boston’s New England Conservatory. After earning two diplomas there—in organ performance and piano pedagogy—she returned to the South, where she worked principally as a piano instructor at segregated academies until 1927. At that time, increasing racist violence prompted her and her family, including two daughters, to relocate permanently to Chicago’s predominantly African American South Side. A rich collection of active musicians, writers, and dancers in this new environment offered Price boundless artistic inspiration and social support, spurring her to pursue composition far more extensively than ever before. 

Within a few short years, she would win several prizes, premiere a symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and serve as the soloist in her own Piano Concerto. Building on this success, she also wrote dozens of smaller works—especially art songs and pieces for solo piano—that reached international audiences over the next decade in recitals from leading artists like contralto Marian Anderson, as well as through publication by prominent firms. By the 1950s, however, she would yearn for a return to orchestral music, telling conductor Robert Whitney in April 1953 that she had “recently decided to give more time to writing the kind of music which lies closest to my heart.” The music in question was her Second Violin Concerto. Alas, Price died suddenly only two months later, just as she was planning an overseas trip and before she could hear the new concerto premiered. 

Written for and dedicated to her friend Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg, the concerto marks a new stylistic direction for Price and leaves many open questions about where she might have gone next. A tantalizing explanation for the shift may lie in her brief private studies with composer Roy Harris in 1946. Sharing mutual interests, the two explored various uses of unusual scales and devoted considerable attention to folk melodies. Harris completed his own violin concerto in 1949—three years before Price finished hers—though his was not performed until 1984, suggesting that any similarities reflect joint artistic aims more than direct influence. 

Most striking, both composers rejected the conventional three-movement concerto structure—fast-slow-fast—in favor of an overarching single movement broken into discrete sections interwoven by a theme and variations. This effort at compactness rewards close listening, as the interplay between familiar and unfamiliar music gives the pieces a pronounced forward momentum. In Price’s case, the form might be best understood as a “double variation,” in which two distinct bodies of music appear sequentially and then return in various guises in the same order multiple times across the piece. 

The concerto opens with a dramatic orchestral gesture framing the solo violinist’s free, almost cadenza-like entrance; it will recur as a structural punctuation mark. The soloist eventually lands on the folksy, dance-like first theme characterized by distinctive melodic flourishes and dotted rhythms. The second theme, in contrast, is lush, soaring, and prayerful, reaching straight to the heart. The kaleidoscopic play of both themes across the concerto manifests Price’s interest in folk music from around the world: Together they sound earthy, joyous, and tender, but we would be hard-pressed to place them in any one location—a nod toward cultural unity that Price’s aborted European trip likely would have fostered. —D.S.