[This is the second in a series of posts of “blogified” short entries from the forthcoming second, enlarged edition of my Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music [Lanham, Maryland] — i.e., entries whose style is lightly adapted to make them more blog-friendly. For an explanation of where this little series of…

[This is the first in a series of posts of “blogified” short entries from the forthcoming second, enlarged edition of my Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music [Lanham, Maryland] — i.e., entries whose style is lightly adapted to make them more blog-friendly. When I submitted the manuscript for the first edition…

A Title Explained, and a Significant Performance of Margaret Bonds’s Credo I finished my first edition of the orchestral version of the Bonds/Du Bois Credo in the summer of 2018. Back then, I was mystified that the piece had remained unperformed since 1973 despite Rollo Dillworth’s 2003 dissertation that included…

The Conservatory of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Brings Margaret Bonds’s Civil-Rights Credo to the Home of Dred Scott’s Enslavement — and Freedom This coming Friday Prof. Jennaya Robison will conduct the combined choirs and orchestra of the Conservatory at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in what promises…

Reflecting on Her Recorded Interview with James V. Hatch Most commentaries on Margaret Bonds either quote or refer to this passage: I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place — I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because…

The Voice of Margaret Bonds Rises in Three Events in the U.S. Capital This Weekend The estimable Margaret Bonds’s (1913–72) musical ambitus, which stretched from one coast to the other made her the first female African American classical composer to have her music performed in Africa during her lifetime, has been steadily broadening in recent years. Recordings and performances of the works that have long…

The Song of Hope sounds at Ithaca College under the baton of Michael Stern [ This post is occasioned by the world première of Florence B. Price’s “Song of Hope,” to be given at Ithaca College by a chorus made up of the Ithaca High School Chorale, Cornell University Chamber…

A Gospel Song by Florence Price and Langston Hughes Gets a Belated First Recording — Popular exclamations about the trove of Florence Price manuscripts found in an abandoned house south of Chicago in 2009 are ubiquitous, and to date G. Schirmer, which in 2018 acquired the exclusive international rights to Price’s complete catalog, has published 113 editions and arrangements of that music — an impressive…

Part 1 Margaret Bonds heard her magisterial setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s CREDO performed just twice: once with piano in Washington, D.C., and once with orchestra in California. Both of those performances were in 1967. On 21 April 1972 she wrote Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic had begun rehearsing the…