On the Origins of He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand by Margaret Bonds Margaret Bonds is justly celebrated for her inspired and inspiring arrangements of spirituals — the body of African American ancestral melodies that W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 declared “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.” From her first published collection (the Five Spirituals commissioned by…

[This is the sixth 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…

On the Extraordinary Mel-Bonis (1858–1937) [This is the fifth 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…

Today witnesses the release of 2022’s second[1] milestone in the recorded legacy of Florence B. Price: the world-premiere recording of Florence Price’s 1941 masterpiece, Scenes in Tin Can Alley- a three movement programmatic suite that occupied her for some thirteen years, from the first version of the first movement (1928)…

A Commencement Letter from Langston Hughes, Shared with Margaret Bonds We are in an age of marches, of collective protests against official policies and actions, of collective voicings of solidarity with the casualties and victims of those official perfidies. Whether they protest Republican lawmakers’ unswervingly cowardly refusal to take even modest steps to stop the epidemic of gun violence that…

[This is the fourth 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 third 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 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…