The Price is Wrong

Of all the marginalized composers who’ve yet to receive the acclaim they deserve—and there are many—Florence Price is perhaps the one closest to getting her flowers. 

Dedicated work on Price has been happening since the 1970s without fanfare, with scholars like Barbara Garvey Jackson, Rae Linda Brown, and Helen Walker-Hill championing Price’s music. The 2009 discovery of forgotten manuscripts in a dilapidated home saved some of her works from historical obliteration and set the scene for the current Price revival. Grammy awards for best orchestral performance went to albums of Price’s music in both 2022 and 2023; a 2022 survey of 111 orchestras by Donne found that she was the most-performed woman composer worldwide. 

When music publisher G. Schirmer announced, in 2018, that they had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to Florence Price’s catalog, it seemed like a watershed moment for the composer’s legacy and the publisher’s reputation. 

Born in 1887 into the Black upper class in Little Rock, Arkansas and raised in a highly educated and musical family, Price published her first composition at age 11. She graduated high school as valedictorian at 14, then headed to the New England Conservatory, where—taking advantage of white America’s quintessential inability to be racist and correct at the same time—she presented herself as a Mexican student, graduating with two degrees in three years. 

She settled in Chicago, and when her First Symphony was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Price became the first African-American woman to have a piece performed by a major orchestra. But because of the highly prejudiced nature of American society and the classical music establishment, her status and career never reached the heights they could have had she possessed a different identity. 

“I have two handicaps — those of sex and race,” she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1943. “I would like to be judged by merit alone.” When Price died, her work faded from view for a time; the world was not ready to judge her only by her work. 

With their recognizable covers—custard-yellow and leaf-bordered—and low price tags, Schirmer editions are ubiquitous in music studios around the world. (At the time of this writing, the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from the respected Henle Verlag will set you back $151.90. Schirmer’s set is $39.99.) 

Schirmer was perfectly positioned to be both beneficiary and savior in the Florence Price revival with the acquisition of Price’s catalog, which promised a flood of accessible editions of her music. Before 2018, people who wanted to perform Price’s music were generally faced with two choices: play only the handful of compositions available in purchasable form, or put in the legwork of hunting down manuscripts in one of the three American archives holding her music, then do all the copying and editing themselves. Schirmer’s celebratory press release announcing the acquisition painted visions of Price’s entire catalog available at a click, for Schirmer’s famously low prices. 

But the dream of accessible, playable Florence Price sheet music has not materialized. I found inconsistent editing and sloppy engraving in Schirmer’s editions of Price’s piano works, and when I talked to other performers, it became clear my experience was a common one. Many people who had recently studied or performed her music had encountered errors, misprints, and bizarre editing at a level that most musicians go their entire careers without experiencing. 

“The publishing of Florence Price’s music has been a historic, rewarding, and challenging milestone for G Schirmer,” said Peggy Monastra, the vice president of Schirmer, in a statement. “It is an honor and privilege to contribute to the ongoing performances of Ms. Price’s music, especially for works that were previously unavailable.” She continued, “Hundreds of performances of Price’s work have taken place over the past few years using materials that we have made available to the public.”

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Western classical music training is not unlike a particularly dogmatic religion: as performers we are taught to revere every marking in our sheet music. There’s an assumption that the music on your stand is the product of decades if not centuries of rigorous torch-passing, fought over by scholars who have contested every dissonance and every cross-out in the manuscript; that people much smarter and pettier than you have fought to deliver to you the most faithful possible version of a document. 

Even a single error, then, in an edition of music feels like a violation of this social contract. It’s like being told to memorize a Shakespeare monologue and discovering that the only available copy of Hamlet’s speech begins “To beef or not to beef,” or following a beloved recipe for peach pie that claims you need not 1/2 teaspoon of salt, but 12. Score errors awaken a primal helplessness, especially if consulting another edition (always an option when playing canonic composers like Mozart and Schubert) isn’t possible, and when you’re not familiar enough with a composer’s work to make a judgment call. 

“I shouldn’t have to do this, but I have no other choice,” I’ve griped to anyone who will listen (namely my husband, who is innocent in all of this) as I grumpily patch my “Fantasie Nègre“ score with white tape, inking in corrected notes. The score is riddled with mistakes like entirely missing chords, bizarre notes and accidentals that transform straightforward harmonies into post-tonal fever dreams, and melodic lines with jarringly mismatched notes playing in unison. (“It is not uncommon to discover varying degrees of errata when working with newly published materials, some for the first time,” Monastra told VAN.) But my frustration is a sentiment broadly reflected among conductors and performers of Price’s music: We resent that the burden falls on us, but we also accept it as the price (pun not intended) of being among the first to perform underrepresented work.

“To a certain degree, with her music for a while, as people work through it, it’s just kind of par for the course,” said John Jeter, music director of the Fort Smith Symphony and an early advocate of Price’s work. “We’re kind of on the front end of it.” 

“One of the consequences of neglect is that the music that players are interfacing with has all these complications and mistakes, and that then creates an additional barrier on top of the prejudices and lack of recognition,” Anna Wittstruck, director of the Boston College Symphony Orchestra, told me. She described “getting stuck here and there with a lot of questions pertaining to errata” in rehearsals when she first programmed Price’s First Symphony in 2019 at the University of Puget Sound. In 2023, Elena Urioste and Tom Poster published an article on the volume of errors they found preparing works by Price and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for recording. “In an age when so many musicians are looking to champion neglected voices, it sometimes feels as if certain publishers are not on our side,” they wrote, identifying “150 significant misprints” in their edition of Price’s Piano Quintet alone. 

Such errors can bring an ensemble rehearsal or practice session to a grinding halt. Jeter described how a “terrible, terrible” Schott edition of Florence Price’s Concert Overture No. 2—one of the few pieces not covered by Schirmer’s rights deal—created problems. (Schott Music didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “There were so many errors in it that it ultimately cost us,” he said. “There was a piece that we were actually going to re-record coming up, there was one other piece we wanted to include, and we basically ran out of time because I had to spend so much time with the Schott music trying to fix errors. It was taking [recording] session time away.”

The disrupted workflow also has fraught implications for young musicians’ earliest exposure to music by marginalized composers. Programming Price in her first year working with the Boston College Symphony Orchestra, Wittstruck said, “My concern was that it was going to take up a lot of space in the rehearsal process, and what I really needed to do was to be building this orchestra, its morale, its sound, and to keep students motivated.” Matilda Ertz, who works with young pianists at The Youth Performing Arts School and at the University of Louisville, aims to make “Florence Price as canonic as J.S. Bach,” but has run into “obvious mistakes,” which she finds disheartening. “Since a lot of her piano and chamber music is appropriate for younger pianists/musicians, it would be great to have reliable editions,” Ertz told me. 

And it’s so important to performers to get it right because there is a disproportionate amount of pressure on us to present the music well. “If [an orchestra] makes a recording of a symphony by a Black American composer, and there are mistakes in it because of the edition, that’s something that gets baked into the aesthetic and the consumption of the symphony by a large public,” Wittstruck said, “and then has a direct impact on how people are consuming that music.” 

“The editions can do a disservice to Price,” musicologist Douglas Shadle said on the podcast “Sound Expertise.” He continued, “If that is an audience’s first exposure to Price’s music, and it just doesn’t sound good, will they walk away not liking Price?” 

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Price is CANCELLED!” tweeted pianist Alexandra Dariescu in May, briefly causing me to wonder what Florence Price could have done to merit cancellation given that she is dead. What had actually happened was that Dariescu had been scheduled to premiere Price’s Piano Concerto in Romania, but Schirmer’s rental fee of over $2,000 for the conductor’s score and orchestra parts was five times that of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” (written, like the Price Concerto, in 1934). The orchestra opted to strike Price from the program. 

Besides errors, cost is frequently a barrier to performances of Price’s music. For a program put on by students at Vanderbilt University in 2023, Shadle told me, he had to apply for a grant specifically to cover the costs of renting Price’s music. And when Wittstruck programmed Price in 2019, she said the rental fee for the Price First Symphony alone was “over half [her] entire annual budget for the orchestra.” (The parent of a student donated enough money to cover the rental fee.) To add insult to injury, the music for the First Symphony would have been free the year before; Wittstruck had been planning on borrowing it through the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, a special collection within the Free Library of Philadelphia that provides music by marginalized composers to performers and ensembles at modest rates. (Monastra declined to provide information on Schirmer’s rental fees.)

Compromise solutions to mitigate the rental costs can create mixed results. Orchestras often opt to perform only the third movement of Price’s First Symphony, the “Juba,” as a way to get around renting and rehearsing the entire piece—the movement, with its clear connection to African and African-American musical practices, is an approachable, standalone crowd-pleaser that can be quickly rehearsed and slotted onto a whole slew of programs to introduce audiences to Price. But she was a composer who contained multitudes of style and, as Wittstruck put it, “exclusively programming [the “Juba”] is creating a distortion of her compositional style and her large-form thinking and approach to orchestration.” 

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Given these high rental fees, why are Schirmer’s editions of Florence Price’s music so much worse than their editions of, say, the Scarlatti keyboard sonatas? (I’ve worked from the latter without a problem, if you don’t count “having to work on the Scarlatti sonatas” as a problem in and of itself.)

Producing properly edited music requires a great deal of dedicated, painstaking work by teams of trained musicians and scholars. “To produce a new, accurate, scholarly edition takes a significant amount of time – and it needs an editor with an intimate knowledge and understanding of Price’s composing style, so that informed decisions and suggestions can be made,” Urioste and Poster wrote. On the other hand, this is kind of a publisher’s one job. And as Shadle pointed out in the journal American Music, “Schirmer had a vested interest in making as much of Price’s music available as quickly as possible.” 

Since 2010, musicologist Dr. John Michael Cooper, who teaches at Southwestern University, has been privately tracking down and editing Price’s works without publishing them, and has about 160 completed to date. After the 2018 catalog acquisition, Schirmer contacted him to obtain some of his Price work.

Of all the publishers Cooper had ever worked with, Schirmer was the one that most resembled a parent who signs school forms without reading them. He said that while Bärenreiter and Hildegard had asked for engraving files which they then checked, edited, and re-engraved in-house to their own standards, Schirmer simply took the PDFs Cooper sent them and printed them. “They were the first [publisher] for which there was no proofreading or other editorial support,” he told me. “I supplied camera-ready copy and they printed it. It was terrifying, and is, because everyone needs some editorial support and I had none.” (Schirmer obtained 70 of Price’s edited works from Cooper, and he told me that 14 minor mistakes—since corrected—were found after the fact.)

It seems that Schirmer’s modus operandi with Florence Price’s oeuvre has been to lean heavily on the preexisting labor of editors and performers to generate workable editions. When I purchased Helen Walker-Hill’s obscure 1992 compendium of piano music by Black women composers in October 2023, I found that most of the errors in Schirmer’s edition of the “Fantasie Nègre” had an origin in Walker-Hill’s version. Walker-Hill, a scholar-pianist who advocated for Price and other Black composers before it was cool, was working alone, quickly, and—most tragically—with early 1990s-level technology. Schirmer’s 2023 version of the piece appears to me to be a clumsy replication of Walker-Hill’s, and does not credit an editor at all. (Schirmer did not respond to questions about its editorial process.) 

The Philadelphia Orchestra employed three people to edit the parts they rented from Schirmer, who then re-engraved future versions using the orchestra’s corrections. Wittstruck, the Boston College Symphony Orchestra director, saw these different versions of Price’s First Symphony. Her rental in fall 2019 was of a score with almost no performance markings and a plethora of errata; her rental of the same piece in 2023, after Schirmer incorporated the Philadelphia Orchestra’s feedback, showed a “significant difference…in terms of players having interacted with the music”—not only were there bowing, markings, and fingerings, but there was significantly less errata. Jeter reported marking errors in his rental score of “The Oak,” and found later through a colleague that it appeared someone at Schirmer had incorporated his corrections into an updated score.

“We encourage orchestral librarians and performing artists to reach out when issues are found in our editions,” Monastra said, “and are grateful for their feedback.”

We have about 426 identifiable remaining Florence Price compositions, Cooper told me, but an article published shortly after the announcement says, “Schirmer’s editorial team has so far identified about 250 pieces by Price.” When Schirmer made their celebratory 2018 announcement about the exclusive rights to Price’s catalog, they may not have known how big that catalog was.

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There was one repeated motif that arose in every conversation I had with anyone who’d done work on Florence Price. We were all motivated by love for her music: the type of delirious love that leads one to tip headlong into years of obsessive work; the heady attraction that seduces us musicians into choosing this life before we realize how precarious that livelihood is. 

That love forms the basis for the ad-hoc social network that has sprung up around Price’s music, joining music directors, soloists, and librarians as they provide advice and share resources with one another. There are privately circulated errata lists, cataloging errors in certain pieces with suggested corrections. Some people go so far as to make their own editions; one source I contacted mentioned editing and engraving their own private copies of Price’s work for performance purposes. They quietly share the editions with other musicians, explaining that, like a hobbit dodging the eye of Sauron, they intentionally did not publicize this work so as to not attract Schirmer’s attention. 

If you want to work on Florence Price and other marginalized composers, you have to adopt a new method of practice. “It’s just something you kind of deal with, with any composer who just doesn’t have any kind of performing edition,” Jeter told me. “If anyone’s looking at doing any other [marginalized] composers, I think they’re going to have to get into the mindset [that] it’s going to just take time.” 

For this reason, Cooper, the Southwestern University musicologist, gives his music majors assignments working and transcribing from manuscripts. “There is a kind of magic to sitting there and looking at how the composers handle beams, how they handle flags, how they handle these notations and dynamics and swoopy crescendo marks and so on,” he said. “All of those things are wonderful for musicians because music making, interpretation, is such a deeply intuitive art.”

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Price’s music is at the center of a tug-of-war between the idea of a fixed canon and new ideas about changing values and the importance of representation. The frustration myself and others feel at the extra work needed to prepare Price’s music is the natural dissonance that comes from finding that prescriptive classical training did not give us the tools to venture out of the canon. And for those who hear greatness in Price’s music, and labor to bring the sound of that greatness to life, the barriers—costs, time spent cleaning up errors, cataloging issues—feel like insulting mundanities.

Before 2018, Florence Price’s music was predominantly inaccessible: Who but academics and the most ardent performers can view manuscripts in archives and manually copy scores and parts? Schirmer’s catalog acquisition moved Price’s music into the free market; while a deeply imperfect solution, it is now vastly easier to purchase a larger chunk of Price’s oeuvre. “It’s really easy to make Schirmer out to be the bad guy here, because of the price tags,” Anna Wittstruck told me. “But at the same time, this is how this music is getting more widely distributed, and there’s something really admirable about that.”

Seen another way, though, music that used to be available at affordable rates from a library specifically devoted to promoting marginalized composers now apparently costs thousands of dollars for a six-week borrowing period. “Schirmer also charges a per-measure fee for music examples published in books or journals,” Shadle noted, putting additional financial constraints on music scholars wishing to write about Price’s music. He pointed out another consequence of Schirmer’s rental constraints: “University students cannot study the material they’re playing. They can’t bring it to theory class.” Cooper told me, “Until Florence Price’s music is taught and studied in classrooms, performed in the academy, in private lessons and studios and so on, her presence will be only temporary.” 

Diversifying programming makes classical music more inclusive to historically marginalized groups; it’s the members of those groups who have been most disadvantaged by Schirmer’s management of Price’s music, which favors deeper-pocketed institutions. But there is some room for optimism. Price passed away in 1953, so in 2024 some—not all (it’s complicated!)—of her works will enter the public domain. Schirmer will still retain the rights to their own editions, but other publishers can release their own editions of Price’s public domain works. 

Perhaps that’s putting too much faith in the invisible hand of the market. In the current American practice of adapting classical music’s patronage model into an economic system that doesn’t allow companies to exist if they aren’t profitable, though, it’s the only solution we can hope for. Maybe the groundswell of interest in Florence Price will send a message to institutions that there is a permanent appetite for her music. Maybe other publishers will join the hype train and invest in proper editing of her work. Maybe someday there could be as many edition options for Price as there are for, say, Liszt and Chopin. If that happens, maybe ensembles and performers around the world won’t be as hindered by prohibitive rental costs or besieged by errors.

And when that day comes, I won’t be buying Schirmer. ¶

Update, 2/16/2024: A previous version of this article described the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia as offering scores for free. The scores are actually free only for organizations based in Philadelphia. For organizations based elsewhere, the library charges small flat loan fees and for shipping and handling.

Update, 2/16/2024: A previous version of this article referred to The Youth Performing Arts School as part of the University of Louisville. It is actually a separate institution. It also referred to the “Juba” by Florence Price as a movement of the Fourth Symphony. It is actually a movement in the First Symphony.

Update, 2/28/2024: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music as the Edwin Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Works. In addition, the library is not a nonprofit library, but a special collection within the Free Library of Philadelphia.

VAN regrets the errors.