Gough was born inHonolulu and raised in San Francisco,[2] the daughter of James A. Gough and Margaret Kennedy Gough. She studied cello with Stanisłas Bem,[3] and began giving recitals as a girl.[4] She studied withVincent d'Indy at theConservatoire de Paris,[5] where she was the first American cellist to win the Premiere Prix, when she graduated with first honors in 1924.[6][7]
Her older brother Walter Louis Gough was a violinist and violin teacher in San Francisco.[8]
Gough played in recitals[9] beginning in the 1910s. "Her talent is still in the bud, but the color and texture of its full-blown perfection can easily be foretold," wrote a newspaper reviewer of her skill in 1918.[10] She was heard on radio concerts from the 1920s.[3][11]From 1929 to 1934, Gough was head of the cello department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.[12][13] She performed with the San Francisco Symphony[14] and the Abas Quartet.[15][16] She gave her New York debut accompanied by her pianist husband in 1934, in two concerts at Town Hall.[6][17]
Gough was based in Los Angeles in midlife. She played forNBC Radio,[18] with theLos Angeles Philharmonic,[19][20] and with the South Bay Civic Symphony.[21] In the 1960s, she played cello and viola with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. She toured with the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1966, in a program highlighting the women in the orchestra.[22] Her forced retirement at age 70 was one of the grievances in the Pittsburgh Symphony's musician strike in 1975; she played cello at the strikers' five-hour fundraiser concert.[23]
Flori Gough married a fellow musician, Russian pianist Lev Shorr, in 1930.[12] Later that year, she fell seriously ill with pneumonia.[24] She was injured in a fatal car accident in 1932.[25] The Shorrs divorced in 1936.[26] She lived in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s,[19][21] in Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 1970s,[22] and in Arizona in the 1980s.[8] She died in 1992, at the age of 86, in San Francisco.
^Shorr gave various birth years in sources. The year is 1905 in the Social Security Death Index, and on her 1920 application for a United States passport; via Ancestry.
