African Dance, on a Text by Langston Hughes, Gets Its Posthumous Premiere This Weekend
On Sunday, November 14, 2021, Greg Watkins and the Chorale of the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (CAAPA Chorale) will give the posthumous premiere of a remarkable composition by Margaret Bonds (1913–72): the…
This past weekend, one of America’s great orchestras, the Minnesota Orchestra, made the first professional recording of Margaret Bonds’s (1913–72) The Montgomery Variations. The recording, which should be available, OPEN ACCESS, online within a few weeks, is a milestone in the recovery of the ever-ingenious composer’s masterpieces that had little…
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Before 1934, Margaret Bonds publicly performed only all-White recitals. After 1934, she never did that again. Why the change?
In the Summer of 2019 I made my first (ten years’ belated) trip to the Deering Library at Northwestern University to examine that library’s archival holdings pertaining to…
Langston Hughes’s relationship with the Christian church was . . . complicated. Except that it wasn’t. While he acknowledged that the Black church was an organizational pillar of the African American community and embraced the resultant sense of community solidarity, he was well aware that Christianity was the professed religion…
Margaret Bonds traveled nearly constantly in her adult life. Even though she maintained a single address in New York from 1940 until her move to Los Angeles in 1967, she toured constantly as a pianist and public speaker, often performing her own compositions as soloist, duo-pianist, and collaborative pianist, in…
The long, close, and miraculously productive collaborative friendship between Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes is well known. Late in life Bonds recalled how Hughes’s seminal poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers had “helped save [her]” during her difficult years as a student…
YESTERDAY I LEARNED that Elaine Fine, whose arrangement of the now-quite-popular Adoration for violin or viola with piano remains the finest of the many arrangements of that piece, has done a new and very beautiful arrangement of another work by Florence Price: the Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the…
This post is a short one, but I hope you’ll find it interesting.
In an earlier post I remarked that Florence Price had submitted all four of her Fantasies nègres for piano solo to the 1932 Wanamaker competition — the competition in which the first version of her Fourth (B-minor)…
This past weekend was filled with plenty of grim news – the stuff that headlines are made of.
But amidst that distressing din there were also some most welcome tidings: on July 15, 2021 Maestro Gustavo Dudamel will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a new performance of “excerpts” from…
In life and in their contemporary and posthumous receptions, the color line profoundly separated Margaret Bonds (1913–72) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). This would not have been lost on Margaret Bonds — but her six recently published songs on sonnets by Millay demonstrate that she also recognized that their…
