Written in her forties, Florence Price’s Piano Sonata in E minor infuses elements of her heritage with European classical music traditions. Drawing inspiration from Romantic composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Camille Saint-Saëns, this sprawling, three-movement work opens with an Andante-Allegro, featuring energetic piano passages that build in intensity. Price’s use of syncopated rhythms, polyrhythms, and harmony explore African American spiritual melodies that are manifested in different forms as the sonata proceeds.

Cann describes the second movement as one of “the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever played.”

This lush Andante movement in rondo form is a stirring expression of Price’s musical voice, one that is accompanied by luxuriant harmonies that ache with a sense of nostalgia. The use of chromaticism and unexpected modulations add to the movement’s emotional depth. The final movement, Scherzo: Allegro, is a lively, imaginative conclusion to the sonata, infused with themes from the first movement and featuring intricate runs and trills that demonstrate Price’s technical mastery and bring the work to a triumphant close.

On September 3, 1930, 17-year-old Margaret Bonds premiered Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 1 in E minor at the 12th National Association of Negro Musicians convention. Not only did this well-received performance strengthen the recognition of Price as a composer of note, but it elevated the visibility of Bonds as a prodigious young talent to watch and was one of their earliest collaborations. This groundbreaking piece established a new genre and was the first of four fantasies she wrote to blend the classical music tradition with Negro spirituals and plantation songs. In Fantasie nègre No. 1, Price incorporated the melody of the beloved spiritual, “Sinners, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” into the score, with interludes that evoke both Brahms and Chopin.

In the remaining fantasies, all of her themes were stylistically based upon Black musical idioms, yet the tunes were solely composed by Price. Each of these innovative pieces features extended, improvisatory introductions, while the rhythms create a sense of tension and release. From its opening bars, the ambitious Fantasie nègre No. 2 in G minor introduces a distinctive call-and-response figure that evolves in four stages as the piece gathers to a dramatic finale.

The last of Price’s surviving essays for solo piano, Fantasie nègre No. 4 in B minor, was premiered on July 15, 1937, by pianist Marion Hall MacFadyen at a Composers Forum concert of the Federal Music Project in Chicago. This audacious and challenging work introduces a spiritual-inspired rhapsodic main theme, contrasted by a Jazz Age blues-hued melodic subject and an arpeggiated transitional passage reminiscent of the piano music of Robert and Clara Schumann. The final virtuosic minutes of the piece gather all the ingenious ideas Price has introduced throughout and compress them into a breathtaking 32-bar conclusion.

Composed as a show-stopping closer for her solo recitals and performed as an inspirational statement of racial and cultural pride, Margaret Bonds’s dazzling Spiritual Suite was inspired by the concert encores of legendary Black vocalists Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. Based on settings of traditional Negro spirituals (“Dry Bones,” “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells,” and “Wade in the Water”) and infused with the idioms of gospel, jazz, and blues, this three-movement suite was drafted throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Although it became one of Bonds’s most celebrated and studied works, the rousing finale, “Troubled Water,” was the only movement to be published during her lifetime.

It was not until 2020, when Dr. Louise Toppin, a significant force in archiving the repertoire of Black composers, edited all three movements of the suite and had them printed as part of the Videmus African American Art Song Series, that “Valley of the Bones” and “The Bells” became available for future generations of pianists to rediscover and bring to life—a fitting revival to one of the most significant classical artists of the twentieth century.