Douglas Shadle will give a talk titled “Composer Florence Price, Arkansas, and the Law” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 8, in Gearhart Hall Room 26. Shadle is an associate professor and chair of the musicology and ethnomusicology department at Vanderbilt University and is currently writing a biography of Florence Price in collaboration with Samantha Ege. This hybrid event will also be streamed on Zoom, and registration is required for virtual participants.
Little Rock native Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953), the first African American woman to earn international acclaim as a composer, called Arkansas home for nearly four decades. The available published research on Price has explored the significance of the state’s rich cultural heritage on the development of her musical style. Drawing on previously unstudied evidence, this presentation will examine the shifting legal landscape in early Jim Crow Arkansas and demonstrate that the state’s racist legal system profoundly shaped Price’s family values as well as her ultimate decision to pursue classical music as a profession. Viewed in this light, Arkansas was a profound source of both inspiration and struggle.
Shadle is the author of two books, Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (2021) and Orchestrating the Nation (2016), both published by Oxford University Press. His work has been cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker and Boston Globe. His recent essay “Classical Music and the Color Line,” published in Boston Review, examined how “more than anything, the artistic questions facing classical music today go well beyond the simple dualism of keeping or tossing the canon; they revolve most of all around access and the hurdles facing marginalized musicians.”
The University Libraries Special Collections Division is home to the Florence Beatrice Smith Price Collection (MC 988) and the Florence Beatrice Smith Price Papers Addendum (MC 988a). Materials include original compositions, correspondence, photographs, concert programs and biographical documents. These materials are available to researchers by appointment from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday in the Special Collections Reading Room, located on the first floor of Mullins Library.
The Libraries Digital Services Unit created the Florence Price digital collection, which includes 50 scans of selected materials from the physical collections.
This event is sponsored by the Department of Music and the University Libraries Special Collections Division.
This article was originally written by Micaela K. Baranello for Arkansas News.