Perhaps no historical composer has sparked more public interest in recent memory than Florence Price (1888–1953). Since 2018, when Alex Ross of the New Yorker and musicologist Micaela Baranello reported on the world premiere recording of Price's two violin concertos in expansive contextual essays, global performances of her music have skyrocketed, even despite the COVID-19 pandemic. As one scholar among many endeavoring to build on biographical work by pioneers like Barbara Garvey Jackson, Mildred Denby Green, and Rae Linda Brown, I've come face to face with impediments to scholarship on American classical music embedded in the webs of contemporary global capitalism manifested in the classical music industry. This essay offers reflections on a few of these challenges.
Documents in the Rae Linda Brown papers held at Emory University indicate that Price scholars and performers ran into significant difficulty discerning who managed the rights to Price's catalog after her daughter's death...