The Mother of Florence B. Price The tombstone (a marker, really) is in Achor, Columbiana County, Ohio. On it is the name of Florence Bartram (1859–1948), who was the widow of John A. Bartram (1870–1945), a retired florist and the widower of Luella (Louella) Bartram, née Guy (1869–1924):

A Conspirare Premiere and a Gratuitous Youthful Photo Langston Hughes’s poem Joy was first published in the collection The Weary Blues (1926), part of an astonishing outpouring of inspiration that was born after Hughes dropped out of Columbia University in 1922 and took a job working as a “saloon messman”…

The Margaret Bonds / W.E.B. Du Bois Credo Returns to Its Roots Margaret Bonds’s relationship with her father was complicated but rich — more so on both counts than is generally known. And when the choral/orchestral version of Bonds’s setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic civil-rights Credo receives its first performance in Texas this weekend, the world will be treated to a…

Margaret Bonds’s Montomery Variations and Credo on the Same Program with the Hartford Chorale and Hartford Symphony Orchestra Margaret Bonds’s The Montgomery Variations (1963–64) and setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic civil-rights Credo (1965–67), both published on a rental basis by Theodore Presser in 2020,have long been considered her orchestral and choral-orchestral masterpieces (although it must be noted that Margaret Bonds’s own authentic orchestral version of the other…

Have you ever been in a crowd or out in public and heard a voice that you immediately recognize, even if you haven’t yet seen the person speaking? Most composers eventually develop a distinctive musical style — approaches to melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and even choice of lyrics that collectively…

Twenty Years Down the Road, a Great Composer Revisits an Early Work and Asks, “What’s in a Name?” There aren’t many students of compositional process these days, but those who still appreciate the wonders that can come to light when we poke around in the composers’ workshop know that it’s always fascinating when composers return to a previously completed work after a period away from it. Among canonical…

Speaking Truth to Power In the late nineteenth century, the railroads were the primary means for shipping goods and materials quickly, efficiently, and cheaply from one part of the continent to another, and for people to traverse the great and narrow distances among urbanized areas. During the era from end of Reconstruction until 1956…

The Second Violin Concerto in 1953 It’s generally said that Florence Price’s moving and innovative Second Violin Concerto was premiered by White violinist Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1957), who was frequently featured as soloist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the early years of the twentieth century, and for whom it was written, in a Musician’s Club…

The world premiere of the “revised and extended” version of Margaret Bonds’s The Ballad of the Brown King (December 11, 1960) HISTORY WAS MADE on this day in 1960. On December 11 — also a Sunday, as it is this year- the revised and extended (nine-movement) version of Margaret Bonds’s and Langston Hughes’s seminal Christmas cantata The Ballad of the Brown King received its world premiere in the Clark Auditorium of…