Abstract
<p>On June 15, 1933, Florence Price became the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra when the Chicago Symphony premiered her award-winning Symphony No. 1 in E minor. <italic>South Side Impresarios</italic> not only tells the story of how Price arrived at this historic moment but also illuminates the numerous other African American women who worked alongside her and collectively transformed Chicago’s classical music scene.These women were, like Price, highly educated, musically trained, race proud, and gender conscious. In other words, they were Race women. Artistry and activism entwined as they navigated the racial segregation of their locale and the discriminatory strictures of the classical world. Through their efforts, a dynamic climate of Black classical music-making bloomed from their South Side base, with a complex of infrastructures, institutions, and ideologies undergirding their sponsorship and support of Black classical talent. This was the environment in which Price found a sense of belonging, in which Marian Anderson gained her earliest champions, and in which Margaret Bonds absorbed the Black Chicago Renaissance energies of the practitioners around her. <italic>South Side Impresarios</italic> demonstrates the interactivity of these trajectories in a composition of what Samantha Ege calls “nested herstories.” The result is less a group biography and more a collectivist storytelling that asserts Race women’s centrality to the culture of music patronage and performance in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century.</p>