by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hi everyone!
This month, I’ll be sharing about another orchestral composer, Chicago-born Margaret Bonds. Born in 1913, Bonds was an integral part of the African American arts and cultural movement known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. You may recognize the name of one of Bonds’ dear friends and musical companions, composer Florence Price (1887-1953). In fact, Bonds was such a skilled pianist that she performed Price’s Piano Concerto in 1933 with the Chicago Symphony at the World’s Fair, making her the first African American woman to be featured as a soloist with a major American symphony orchestra.
Lately, Bonds is becoming a household name for vocalists and choral directors thanks to her extensive compositional output for voice, but she also composed several substantial pieces for orchestra, musical theater, and piano. Many of her works were written in collaboration with noted poet, author, and fellow member of the Chicago Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901-1967), by setting his words to music.
When it comes to the horn, orchestral music doesn’t get more brass-heavy than the opening of Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations (1964). Trumpets, horns, and trombones perform the unbroken and unapologetic melody based on the Negro spiritual I Want Jesus to Walk with Me, while the strings punctuate with accented bursts of sound. For a piece about the Civil Rights movement and the bravery of Black Americans who fought for their rights and equality, Bonds’ emphatic use of the brass is incredibly appropriate for the first movement, which she titled Decision, named after Black Americans’ decision to defy the infamous Jim Crow laws of the South. The piece is named after the Montgomery bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and was written in the immediate aftermath of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Very recently, Bonds’ work has been garnering recordings and performances by orchestras like the Boston Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra, but it is still, unfortunately, relatively unknown in the broader orchestral world.
