Pianist Michelle Cann honoring Black female composers in concert at Chicago's Logan Center

Almost forgotten after her death in 1953, African-American composer Florence Price’s star has risen dramatically in the last 15 years or so, and pianist Michelle Cann’s championing her music has played a significant role in that revival.

Now with a solo piano program titled “The Women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance,” Cann has set her sights on four other under-recognized Black female composers from Chicago, three of whom had connections to Price.

“I started with Florence Price and that’s great,” Cann said. “Everybody knows her name now. What about all these other names? So many of these names need advocates. They need us to dig up the past and say: ‘Hey, people did not really hear this but you should hear it.’”

Cann debuted the line-up in a slightly different form in April 2023 at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., and she will present it for the first time in Chicago Jan. 24 under the auspices of University of Chicago Presents.

Including the program on the series’ 2024-25 season was a no-brainer, said Sarah Curran, who became executive director of U of Chicago Presents in June 2023 after two seasons in an interim capacity.

“She’s a phenomenal artist,” Curran said, “and this program just speaks so directly to Chicago audiences, Chicago history and Chicago’s role in classical music and American music. And specifically, the women of Chicago’s Black renaissance are given their flowers as much as they ought to be.”

Cann will sprinkle the concert with commentary, bringing together both her background as a top soloist and longtime pedagogue, whose current teaching posts include the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she serves as the Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies.

“She will bring some really great insights into the personal relationships, the historical relationships — the way these women influenced each other,” Curran said.

Price moved to Chicago in the late 1920s after a breakout of racial violence in her native Little Rock, Ark., and gained considerable fame in the 1930s and ‘40s. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, the first composition by an African-American woman to be presented by a major orchestra.

Cann was introduced to the composer’s music in 2016 when she was asked to perform the New York premiere of her Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934) with The Dream Unfinished Orchestra.

“I knew nothing of her at all,” the Cherry Hill, N.J., pianist said. “Even her name was not familiar to me. So, the music itself was my first introduction, and the concerto is a great piece. I was moved by the music, and was intrigued to know: Who was the person who wrote this?”

An invitation to perform the work with the high-profile Philadelphia Orchestra as part of its 2020-21 WomenNOW series led to appearances with other major orchestras and solidified her place as a top-tier soloist. Her recording of Price’s art songs with soprano Karen Black, “Beyond the Years,” is nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award.

Cann’s connection with Price’s music led her to undertake research on other Black composers in the composer’s orbit. “I realized how many more women are out there who achieved great things in American history whose stories weren’t told, who were forgotten,” she said.

The result is this program, which includes Price’s “Fantasie Nègre” No. 1 and 2 but focuses mainly on the works of four other Chicago composers, at least three of whom Price knew to various degrees:

• Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), “Spiritual Suite.” Bonds was a student of Price and one of her best friends. She became the first Black woman to perform as a soloist with a major orchestra, joining the CSO in June 1933 on the same program in which Price’s Symphony No. 1 received its premiere. Bonds is most recognized for her art songs, and “Spiritual Suite” is her main work for solo piano, with each section inspired by a familiar spiritual, including “Wade in the Water.”  
  
• Betty Jackson King (1928-1994), “Four Seasonal Sketches.” King was best known as a member of the Jacksonian Trio, a vocal group that also featured her sister and mother, and she served as president of the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1980-85. She wrote just a handful of works for solo piano, including this one, with each movement echoing the style of a different past composer like Claude Debussy. “It is a beautiful set of pieces based on the seasons, literally, so you have spring, summer, fall and winter,” Cann said. 
  
• Nora Holt (1885-1974), Negro Dance Op. 25, No. 1. Holt was born the earliest of the five composers on the program, and Cann called her the “big ancestor of them all.” In 1918, she became the first African-American to earn a master’s degree in music and she went on to study with famed French composer Nadia Boulanger in 1931. She wrote more than 200 musical works, but the manuscripts were stolen when she was abroad and all but two of the creations remain lost. One of those to survive is this short dance, which was published in Music and Poetry, a monthly magazine that Holt edited in 1921-22. “It’s such a great little piece,” Cann said.
  
• Irene Britton Smith (1907-1999), “Variations on a Theme by MacDowell.” The Chicago native studied composing part time at the Chicago-based American Conservatory of Music while serving as a primary teacher, eventually gaining her bachelor’s degree in 1943. According to Cann, encouragement she received from Price led her to continue her studies, including a summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. This set of variations was written in 1947, around the time she took a sabbatical from teaching to undertake graduate work at the famed Juilliard School in New York.

Cann knows that many of the names on this program are unknown, but she hopes Chicago audiences will give it a chance. She has received many enthusiastic responses from listeners elsewhere, with piano teachers and others even asking where to buy copies of the music.

“That for me is everything,” she said.