The Department of Music welcomes Larry Hamberlin on Thursday, Oct. 24, to the Billingsley Music Building for a lecture about composer Florence Price titled, "From the Outside In: Interpreting Florence Price's Sonata in E Minor." Hamberlin, professor emeritus at Middlebury College in Vermont and a U of A alumnus, will talk about Price, her 1932 piano sonata and its place in the history of Black classical music in America. 

Recent scholarship and recordings have brought renewed attention to Price's piano sonata; its musical language as an amalgam of European romanticism and Black American folk idioms challenges present-day performers to assess their own relationships to the musical traditions that she so artfully blends. Research into Price's piano sonata was drawn from manuscript sources housed in the U of A's Mullins Library's Florence Price Papers.

The lecture will be at 5 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in the Billingsley Music Building, room 335, and is open to the public.

About Larry Hamberlin: Hamberlin is the Professor Emeritus of Music at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont; a historian of American music; a performer; and a composer. His books include The Curious Listener (W. W. Norton, 2025), Tin Pan Opera: Operatic Novelties in the Ragtime Era (Oxford University Press, 2011) and, with Richard Crawford, An Introduction to America's Music (3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2018).