Composer Spotlight

Welcome to our fourth Composer Spotlight! This week, we get to know Margaret Bonds, an immensely influential 20th century composer and musician, who we spoke briefly about in our Special Edition Score Club last week. This week’s Composer Spotlight is brought to you again by OrchestraOne’s Emma Schmiedecke.

Throughout her life, composer and pianist Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was one of those rare artists that not only created her own material but brought together many of the most influential African-American artists of the mid-20th century into a creative community. A native of Chicago, Illinois, Bonds started studying piano with her mother and composed her first work, Marquette Street Blues, at the age of five. Her father was physician and early civil rights activist Monroe Alpheus Majors, so Margaret grew up in a home frequented by the leading black intellectuals and artists of the day, such as composers Will Marion Cook and Florence Price (who would later become her composition teacher) and soprano Abbie Mitchell.

She became one of the few black students at Northwestern University and graduated from the school with both a bachelors and masters degree in music in 1934, but not before winning first prize at age 19 in the vocal category of the Wanamaker Award for her piece Sea-Ghost in 1932. She performed often as a pianist, soloing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, becoming the first African-American woman to perform as a soloist with a major American orchestra. She also championed the works of fellow African-American composers, performing Florence Price’s Piano Concerto with the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago in 1934.

In 1939, Bonds moved to New York City to continue her studies at the Juilliard School and lived in the historically black neighborhood of Harlem, where she met and became close friends with writer Langston Hughes, setting much of his writing to music in her vocal works. She also contributed to the cultural life of Harlem, helping to establish a cultural community center, serving as minister of music in one of the neighborhood churches, and forming the Margaret Bonds Chamber Society.

Bonds used many traditionally “black” musical genres such as jazz, blues, calypso, and spirituals as inspiration for her composition style, which can be heard in works such as The Ballad of the Brown King, originally written for voice and piano and rearranged by Bonds for chorus, soloists, and orchestra and premiered in 1959. Bonds branched out into the world of theater, writing two ballets and several works of musical theater including Shakespeare in Harlem with a libretto by Langston Hughes (also premiered in 1959.)

Later in her life, she was influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, writing the Montgomery Variations for Orchestra in honor of the 1965 Freedom March on Montgomery, Alabama and dedicating the work to Martin Luther King, Jr. She moved to Los Angeles in 1967 to teach music at the Los Angeles Inner City Institute and the Inner City Cultural Center.

She passed away in 1972, just a few months after the world premiere of her work Credo for Chorus and Orchestra by Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Her music is still being discovered forty years after her death; Simon Bore the Cross, a cantata for voice and piano, had its world premiere in February 2018 by the Georgetown University Concert Choir in Washington, D.C

Margaret Bonds was a creator in many senses of the word as a composer, pianist, teacher, director, and organizer to create a lasting legacy across multiple disciplines that was deeply felt in the African-American community in both her lifetime and beyond.