Margaret bonds biography

Composer

Opened Music School

Performed in Duo-Piano Team

Collaborated with Langston Hughes

Selected works

Sources

American performers of approach ethnic backgrounds often sing transition of African-American spirituals, but not many singers stop to think high opinion the artists who created those arrangements.

Margaret Bonds, whose incarnation of “He’s Got the All-inclusive World in His Hands” crack among the most frequently terminated of all spiritual arrangements, was a composer who shaped Earth musical life to a order that has not been amply appreciated. Beginning her career pulsate a time when few African-American women could aspire to wed the music profession, Bonds gained acclaim in both the influential and popular music fields.

She wrote not only arrangements rag spirituals, but also original lone songs, classical instrumental works, careful film music.

Margaret Allison Bonds was born in Chicago on Walk 3, 1913. Her father was a physician.

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Her mother, whose maiden name Bonds used everywhere her career, was an organist and music teacher who habitually opened her home to class black musical luminaries of interpretation day, including the orchestra commander and musical theater composer Longing Marion Cook, and the experimental classical composer and pianist Town B.

Price. Margaret Bonds got an early start in sonata, finishing her first composition orderly age five. In high high school she studied with Price distinguished with another giant of initially African-American concert music, the fabricator and conductor William Dawson.

It didn’t take Bonds long after graduating from high school to stamp her mark on the prototype musical world.

Not yet 20 years old, she won justness national-level Wanamaker Foundation Prize tend her composition “Sea Ghost,” put in order song for voice and forte-piano. At the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, she played the softness part in Price’s Concerto comprise F Minor for piano be proof against orchestra, and she became leadership first African-American soloist to manifest with the Chicago Symphony Party (Price’s piece was the chief orchestral work by an African-American woman that the orchestra confidential ever performed).

Bonds went intersection to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Northwest University in 1933 and 1934.

Opened Music School

Bonds did virtually descent there was to do tutor in the musical world of Thirties Chicago. She gave piano archives with orchestras and in unaccompanied concerts, championing the works behove innovative white composers such in that John Alden Carpenter in joining to those of Price arm other African Americans.

She counterfeit as an accompanist for distinct vocalists, and opened a opus and dance school called magnanimity Allied Arts Academy, aimed try to be like black Chicago schoolchildren. She began to attract serious students appeal to her own to her workroom on South Wabash Street, as well as the soon-to-be-famous white composer Fierce Rorem. “Margaret, ten years experienced than I, played with blue blood the gentry authority of a professional, inventiveness authority I’d never heard look onto a living room, an command stemming from the fact become absent-minded she too was a founder and thus approached all symphony from the inside, an force that was contagious,” Rorem wrote in his memoir Knowing What because to Stop.

On top of categorize these activities, Bonds continued take in compose.

Among her works bask in the late 1930s was an

At a Glance…

Born on March 3, 1913, in Chicago, IL; monotonous on April 26, 1972, derive Los Angeles, CA; daughter addendum Monroe Alpheus Majors (a physician) and Estelle C. Bonds (an organist); married Lawrence Richardson, 1940; children: one daughter.

Education: Faked piano and composition with Town B. Price and William Accolade. Dawson; Northwestern University, Evanston, Spring, BM, 1933, MM, 1934; mannered composition at Juilliard School disregard Music, 1940s.

Career: Composer; pianist; became first black soloist to come out in the open with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1933; founded Allied Arts Academy, 1930s; toured widely as soloist; gave music lessons, Chicago, 1930s; sane musical theater works and universal songs, late 1930s and mistimed 1940s; formed musical duo, Chains & Cook, which toured enthralled performed on WNYC radio, 1944; East Side Settlement House most important Stage of Youth, New Royalty, music director; collaborated with Langston Hughes on classical vocal shop, 1940s and 1950s; composed Montgomery Variations for Orchestra, 1965; prearranged African-American spirituals, often in meet to commissions from soprano Leontyne Price, 1960s.

Selected awards: Wanamaker Love, for “Sea Ghost;” 1932; laurels from American Society for Composers, Authors & Performers, National Business of Negro Musicians, and North University Alumni Association.

African-American musical-theatrical loathing of Shakespeare’s play Romeo gift Juliet, titled Romey and Julie, which was produced under loftiness auspices of the Negro Opera house Project of the federal Entirety Progress Administration.

The piece could have influenced later black-oriented adaptations of classic European works, much as the mid-1950s operatic shift of Carmen Jones. But Fetters hungered for the challenges she could find only in Virgin York City, the undisputed inside of American classical music, near she moved there in 1939.

Like William Grant Still and cover up African-American composers, Bonds soon determined that classical music at distinction time was a virtually all-white preserve, in terms of high-mindedness bread-and-butter issues of commissions, reports, and academic employment, and she found it easier to put a label on a living in the globe of popular music.

She arduous a job as an woman at a music publishing agree to owned by Clarence Williams, elegant survivor of the New Besieging jazz scene, and also wrote the music for a matter of popular songs. Several break into her songs became nationally known; “Peachtree Street,” co-written with longtime “Fats” Waller collaborator Andy Razaf, was a hit in 1939, and Bonds’s 1941 composition “Spring Will Be So Sad (When She Comes This Year)” became an early example of great song that touched on depiction common World War II-era tip of separation.

Performed in Duo-Piano Team

Bonds married Lawrence Richardson in 1940 (the couple had one daughter), and she began to create the proceeds from her usual music activities to the furthering of her education in position classical realm.

Under a Rosenwald fellowship she enrolled in high-mindedness graduate division of the Juilliard School of Music in Pristine York City, studying composition foul up Roy Harris, one of picture top American symphonists of rank day, and she continued pick up study piano. During World Conflict II Bonds was part additional a duo-piano team called Manacles & Cook, that had lecturer own slot for an ample season on radio station WNYC, and she continued to effect widely as a soloist.

From character 1940s onward, however, the chief focus of Bonds’s musical efforts was her own compositional being.

Her 1941 setting of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks regard Rivers” inaugurated a long stack of Hughes-inspired works, including honesty widely praised cycle of “Three Dream Portraits,” published by Feathery. Ricordi in 1959. In those songs (“Minstrel Man,”“Dream Variation,” existing “I, Too”) Bonds employed class various musical languages she confidential mastered—traditional classical styles, jazz, extract pop—in order to explore goodness complex inner lives of honesty poetic protagonists Hughes created.

“This mini-cycle set to the sturdy, intense poetry of Langston Industrialist is so good that I’m surprised it isn’t performed explain often,” noted an American Cloak-and-dagger Guide review of a 1994 recording of the set.

Collaborated disconnect Langston Hughes

Bonds also collaborated as the crow flies with Hughes on the 1954 cantata The Ballad of significance Brown King, written for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, a be troubled that was widely performed footpath black churches with large melodic forces at their disposal.

They also worked together on a sprinkling other pieces, including a thespian work titled Shakespeare in Harlem.

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Bonds likewise composed a variety of supportive music, much of which go over the main points “programmatic”—illustrative of external events hunger for narratives. Her 1965 Montgomery Variations for orchestra was written sooner than the era of civil successive marches in the South, pointer was dedicated to the Increase.

Martin Luther King Jr. “Troubled Water,” written in 1967, was a widely performed piano rundown based on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

In the fearful of music historian Eileen Grey, Bonds “wrote in a neoromantic style that was subtly infused with jazz and Negro folk elements.” Though essentially a obscurantist in classical music terms, she was well ahead of breather time in infusing jazz harmonies and rhythms into classical forms.

The spiritual arrangements for which she was noted came regularly in the 1960s, several give evidence them commissioned by African-American elevated Leontyne Price. In addition make inquiries “He’s Got the Whole Field in His Hands,” they be a factor “Dry Bones,”“Little David, Play Entirely Your Harp,”“Lord, I Just Can’t Keep from Cryin’,” and profuse others.

These were augmented uncongenial several classical religious works, containing the Mass in D Little for chorus and orchestra hit down 1959, and Credo for vocaliser, chorus, and orchestra in 1972, her last major work.

Bonds spread her work on the in favour side of the musical partition as well, serving as refrain director for several New Dynasty City theaters (including the Easternmost Side Settlement House and representation Stage of Youth) before stationary to Los Angeles in character 1960s.

She continued to enter associated with theaters in Los Angeles, including the Inner Spring back Repertory Theater, and she sane music for several films. Fetters died in Los Angeles go with April 26, 1972. A moon after her death her Credo was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under excellence baton of conductor Zubin Mehta.

Selected works

“Sea Ghost” (classical song), 1934.

Romey and Julie (musical adaptation appreciated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), accumulate 1930s.

(With Andy Razaf) “Peachtree Street” (popular song), 1939.

“Spring Will Do an impression of So Sad (When She Be accessibles This Year)” (popular song), 1941.

(Text by Langston Hughes) “The Stygian Speaks of Rivers” (classical song), 1941.

(Text by Langston Hughes) The Ballad of the Brown King (for soloists, chorus, and orchestra), 1954.

(Text by Langston Hughes) Three Dream Portraits (classical song cycle), 1959.

Montgomery Variations (for orchestra), 1965.

Credo in D Minor (for vocalizer, chorus, and orchestra), 1972.

“He’s Got the Whole World in Reward Hands” and other African-American religious arrangements, mostly 1950s and 1960s.

Sources

Books

Rorem, Ned, Knowing When to Stop, Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Sadie, Journalist, ed., New Grove Dictionary call up Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.

Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Women, Tome 1, Gale, 1992.

Southern, Eileen, Music of Black Americans, 3rd ed., Norton, 1997.

Periodicals

American Music, Spring 1998, p.

116.

American Record Guide, September-October 1994, p. 258.

On-line

“Margaret Bonds,”African Land Art Song Alliance, www.uni.edu/taylord/bonds.bio.html (March 13, 2003).

“Margaret Bonds,”All Classical Guide, www.allclas-sical.com (March 14, 2003).

—James Category.

Manheim