Florence Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock, Ark., to a mixed-race family and was a talented pianist from a young age. She enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music at 14, where she studied composition and graduated in 1907. She married a prominent civil rights attorney and returned to Little Rock, but racial violence — including a lynching in 1927 — caused her family to move to Chicago. In 1932, Price’s Symphony in E Minor won a prize, leading to its premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — the first composition by a black woman to be performed by a major orchestra.⁴

Based on a poem written by Bessie Mayle in 1930, Night exemplifies several aspects of the understated beauty and richness of her style. Black poets of the early twentieth century often used the beauty of the blackness of the nighttime sky to celebrate the beauty of their own Blackness, and to subvert traditional poetic images that viewed the darkness of night as an encroachment on the light of day — a symbolically potent subversion that implicitly encouraged Blacks to recognize their own Blackness as something autonomous and inherently beautiful rather than an encroachment on White dominance. Mayle's poem and Price's music adopt a warm and embracing tone which ultimately affirms that the beauty of blackness and night are what will always endure, always return — and Price's decision to end with a sustained high note on the word evermore emphasizes the importance of that persistence in preserving and celebrating Black beauty.⁵