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Not Defeat, But Triumph

In 1927, in the wake of the lynching of a young black man outside the Bethel A.M.E. church in Little Rock, the Arkansas-born composer Florence Price moved her family north. Six years later, with the premiere of her Symphony in E Minor by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Price became the first black woman to have a large-scale work performed by a major American orchestra. As the musicologist Rae Linda Brown has written, “Marginalized in her occupation by gender and race, Price persevered, and her story is not one of defeat but one of triumph specific to African-American women.” I was reminded of Price’s life and music last weekend, as white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va.; I turned to the slow movement of her pathbreaking 1933 symphony, a regal hymn that echoes the Largo of Dvorak’s “New World.” The movement concludes in poised splendor, as the main hymn theme returns in the brass, serenely punctuated by bells, with the clarinet unraveling eloquent counterpoint. WILLIAM ROBIN