(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Women Composers - #3: Margaret Bonds [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-03 In the latest installment of Women Composers, I’m presenting Margaret Bonds (1913 — 1972.) Some of the Florence Price thread weaves through her life’s story, so it seems fitting to share this now. Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago, IL. Her father was a prominent African American physician, and mother was a musician of the highest caliber. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and she was raised by her mother, who became her first piano teacher. Their home in Chicago was frequented by many notable African American writers, artists, and musicians from the surrounding area, and around the country. Margaret composed her first piece, Marquette Street Blues at the age of 5. During high school, she studied piano and composition with Florence Price and William Dawson. In 1929. she enrolled in Northwestern University at the age of 16, and completed a Bachelor of Music (1933) and a Master of Music (1934) degrees in piano and composition. While she was permitted to study there, she was not permitted to live on campus. Nor was she allowed to use the university’s swimming pool. It was an incredibly racially hostile environment. While a student at Northwestern University, she was in the Evanston Public Library and ran across a poem by Langston Hughes, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ It empowered her to persevere in the face of adversity. Later in her life, she would use this as a setting for voice and piano in one of her compositions. She was active in her career while pursuing her degrees. She won a Wanamaker Music Foundation Prize in 1932 for her composition, The Sea Ghost, which brought her to the public’s attention. In 1933, she was the first African American person to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, by John Alden Carpenter. She returned a year later to perform the Piano Concerto in D Minor, composed by her former teacher, Florence Price. She established the Allied Arts Academy in Chicago. After graduation from Northwestern University, she moved to New York City and continued her studies at Juilliard School of Music, where she studied composition and piano in greater depth. Later, she worked editing music, established the Margaret Bonds Chamber Society, a group of black musicians performing works by black composers. She established a Cultural Arts Center, and worked in the music ministry at a church in Harlem. She had the opportunity to meet poet Langston Hughes in 1936, and they cultivated a friendship that lasted 31 years and collaborated on many major works, where she set his poems to music. They worked together on a Christmas cantata, called The Ballad of the Brown King, which focused on Balthazar, the black king who journeyed with the wise men to Bethlehem. An Easter cantata, written in collaboration with Hughes, Simon Bore the Cross, was a later work. She married Lawrence Richardson in 1940, and had a daughter Djane, in 1946. She had a public performing debut as a soloist in 1952. She worked, and wrote music for Cab Calloway, Woody Herman, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Louis Armstrong, as well as radio and television specials. Inspired by the civil rights movement, she composed a piece called The Montgomery Variations (1964) for orchestra, and dedicated it to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The social justice themes in much of her music is rivaled perhaps only by Nina Simone. Margaret Bonds amassed a body of work of hundreds and hundreds of pieces. Many scores are lost, as she gave the only copies to people to whom the work was dedicated. Throughout her life as a prolific classical composer, she faced systemic racism, as publishers refused to print works by African Americans and women, fearing it wouldn’t sell, and thus perpetuating the racist and sexist void in the system. Most of her music remained in manuscript form until after her death, which further limited its accessibility. The later chapters of Margaret Bonds’ life were rather sad — the death of her dear friend Langston Hughes sent her into a tailspin. She left her husband and daughter to move to Los Angeles. She continued to teach, and compose. But she drank heavily, which contributed to her death at the age of 59. At the time of her passing, she died without a will, leaving no instructions or directives for her body of work. Her daughter Djane Richardson took possession of the manuscripts, and she also later died without a will. One chunk of her mother’s archive was found in a storage locker. By chance, a music dealer noticed a box placed by a dumpster after a book fair, after no buyer or interested person arrived to purchase the non-descript cardboard box filled with handwritten scores, notebooks, and programs. Rather than hauling it all home, and thinking no one was interested, the owner left it to be thrown out. Thankfully, the box, its contents, along with Bonds’ other archived materials were donated to Georgetown University where they have been painstakingly studied and digitized. The box by the dumpster contained the complete score of Simon Bore the Cross, which was previously believed to have been incomplete. Like her teacher Florence Price, Margaret Bonds’ work is being heard for the first time in decades. Here is the Montgomery Variations (1964) performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, under the baton of conductor Scott Yoo. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/3/2156120/-Women-Composers-3-Margaret-Bonds Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/