Margaret Bonds: pianist composer, and teacher

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a pianist, composer, and teacher of music. I probably first became aware of her as a teenager, through some of her arrangements of spirituals for "classical" voice, especially as sung by Leontyne Price (e.g. He's Got The Whole World In His Hand, which Price commissioned from Bonds in the early 1960s) but have only recently delved more deeply into her work, and realized that many of her compositions --- the classical songs and some piano pieces are what I've really gotten into so far--- should be considered classics of 20th century American music. I expect they will become---indeed, hopefully, many of them already are---a permanent part of the classical music repertoire.

Most recently, I was reminded of Bonds by an excellent essay by pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, whose blog Do the M@th is essential reading for those interested in jazz and/or classical music. "Black music teachers in the age of segregation" emphasizes their contribution to the musical development of jazz musicians, both by teaching European techniques and theory, and leading ensembles often covering a wide range of music styles, sometimes integrating African-derived and African-American-developed elements and procedures. Iverson doesn't mention Bonds in his essay, but she is yet another example of a black musician whose role as teacher was important in American music---although her compositions and (sadly, probably under-documented) live performances are equally important contributions.

Bonds as teacher, as well as performer and composer, figures prominently in the diaries and essays of Ned Rorem---she was one of his childhood piano teachers in Chicago, and helped him with his first forays into notated composition. Rorem's discussion of his time with her, as well as with other childhood teachers, in the essay "The Piano in My Life" from Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary is engrossing.

It was time for a real teacher... Margaret Bonds .... at twenty-two was a middle-western "personality", having played Carpenter's Concertino with the Chicago Symphony under the composer's direction, and being herself a composer of mainly spiritual arrangements and of original songs in collaboration with Langston Hughes. ... At our first lesson, she played me some ear-openers, The White Peacock by Griffes, and Carpenter's American Tango. Had I ever heard American music before? ...

Margaret Bonds played with the authority of a professional, an authority I'd never heard in a living room, an authority stemming from the fact that she herself was a composer and thus approached all music from the inside out, an authority that was contagious. [...]

The first piece I wrote down, "The Glass Cloud," was influenced by Margaret's other prize pupil, Gerald Cook. [...] In the years to come his identity with Margaret would shift from student to colleague as the two-piano team, Bonds and Cook, became a glamorous enterprise at Cerutti's in New York, and at Spivy's Roof. When Margaret went her separate way to marriage, motherhood, documentation of Negro song, opera writing, and death, Gerald turned into the greatest living accompanist of the Blues, working first with the lamented Libby Holman, then--and still--with Alberta Hunter.

Did I outgrow Margaret Bonds? Why were lessons discontinued? If there was an objection to a seeming glib jazziness chez elle, Margaret thought of herself as classical and deep. (Conversely, I feel as influenced by prewar jazz as by "serious" music. Not the tune itself but Billie Holiday's way with a tune taught me to knead a vocal phrase, just as Count Basie's piano playing still shapes my piano composing.) In any case Margaret and I lost track of each other until we had all moved East during the war. Then we remained close friends until she died.

The whole essay is a great read, simultaneously sketching with vivid strokes aspects of an era in American music and American life, and of Rorem's musical development.

There is much more about Bonds at the pages for the 2016-2017 exhibitions "Margaret Bonds: Composer and Activist" and "Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes: A Musical Friendship" at the Georgetown University Library (where some of her papers are held) including music manuscripts, photographs, concert programs, and correspondence from, among others, Rorem, Hughes, and Andy Razaf (whose stationery sports a sidebar listing songs he composed and/or wrote the lyrics to). Directly relevant to the matter of Black teachers and the institutions they worked in as a crucial resource in the development of American music is this from the exhibition text:

Throughout the 1950s, Bonds continued her work as a composer, performer and teacher. In addition to private lessons, she joined the staff of East Side House Settlement, a non-profit social services organization committed to serving New York’s underprivileged youth. At East Side House she taught weekly music classes, hosted performances featuring African-American composers, and served as music director for the annual spring musical.

There may be a lot to rediscover about her influence, as a teacher, on jazz and classical musicians, especially African-American ones, during this period in New York. East Side House Settlement is still active.

As far as her work as composer is concerned, from what is available on disc or digital streaming I'm particularly partial to her pieces for solo piano, and her songs. What is available in these genres is extremely good, and should find a permanent place in the repertoire of pianists and singers. Although the list of works in her Wikipedia entry is not lengthy, there is much that looks promising that does not appear to available in recordings or online performances; one hopes that will change.

 The Bells, based on the spiritual Peter Go Ring Dem Bells, from her Spiritual Suite for Piano, beautifully melds influences from European and American classical music (especially Debussy, Ravel, and perhaps Americans like Charles Tomlinson Griffes (who crops up in the Rorem quote above)) with African-American spirituals and pianistic touches reminiscent of jazz or perhaps the popular music of the time. Here it is played by Thomas Otten as part of a 2013 symposium on Bonds' work:

The other two movements, Dry Bones and Troubled Water, are also on youtube played by Otten at this symposium; below, Troubled Water, based on the spiritual Wade in the Water, is played by Samantha Ege:

The Youtube listing for Ege's performance gives the date of Troubled Water as 1967, but Randye Jones' online biography (which also displays the abovementioned concert program) also lists it as part of the Spirituals Suite, which it dates to the 1940s or early 1950s.

Bonds' setting, published in 1959, of Three Dream Portraits by Langston Hughes is superbly done. The only version for low male voice with piano that I've found on Youtube in acceptable sound is an excellent one by baritone Thomas Hampson with Kuang-Hao Wang on piano:

(Dorian Hall deserves mention for a superb performance with Dr. Timothy Cheek on piano, but there is unfortunately a lot of distortion in the recording---this would appear to be a casually recorded, though musically top-notch, recital.) There are several female voice versions on Youtube in good sound, for example one sung by Bonnie Pomfret with Laura Gordy on piano; another by Icy Simpson with Artina McCain on piano and one by an unidentified singer and the Ritz Chamber Players. The live recital recording of no. 1 in the series, Minstrel Man, by Nicole Taylor with Joan Sasaki on piano, is also worth mentioning, though the recorded sound quality is not perfect. Yolanda Rhodes and Josefina Gandolfi also do an excellent job with this song.

The settings of Hughes' Songs of the Seasons are also excellent. Below, an excellent live performance (the vocalist is Louise Toppin) of Summer Storm from a valuable 2013 symposium on Bonds, available as a sequence of youtube videos, that includes lectures as well as performances of works by Bonds and by her teacher, Florence Price (e.g. Price's Night, beautifully sung by the extraordinary countertenor Darryl Taylor).

In this symposium Toppin also performs several excellent songs that are not listed in the Wikipedia entry on Bonds. Stopping by Woods and The Pasture, from 1958, are on texts by Robert Frost; Feast, on a text of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Winter Moon, another of the four Songs of the Seasons, is available in a studio recording by Toppin with John B. O'Brien on piano. Bonds' songs also work beautifully sung by baritone Malcolm Merriweather with Ashley Jackson on harp rather than piano: Winter Moon from Seasons, To A Brown Girl, Dead (1933) on a text by Countee Cullen, and the Three Dream Portraits appear on a CD along with Bonds' Christmas cantata, Ballad of the Brown King, to words of Langston Hughes. Little David is an example of Bonds' setting a traditional African-American spiritual melody and text:

Here, as in many of Bonds' arrangements of spirituals, the piano part doesn't provide a conventional chordal background, nor does it double the voice---it is new musical material that is entirely Bonds', and contrasts with the vocal line while being absolutely appropriate to it.

Last but not least, perhaps Bonds' best known song is her setting of Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers, composed around 1936 and first published in 1944. Bonds spoke of the great personal significance of this poem to her, in an interview with James Hatch quoted in Jones' online biography:

I was in this prejudiced university [Northwestern, where she matriculated in 1929 and where, according to Jones, "she was allowed to study but not to live or use their facilities"], this terribly prejudiced place–I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he [Langston Hughes] tells how great the black man is: And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have–here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school–and I know that poem helped save me.

A favorite performance of mine is Gerald Blanchard's, from his CD on Blue Griffin:

Thomas Hampson gives a mellower, less urgent reading, but beautifully phrased and recorded, and making the text exceptionally intelligible:

One can also find on youtube a mixed-chorus SATB arrangement of this setting---it is not clear to me whether the arrangement is by Bonds herself or not, though I suspect it is---which would be well worth tracking down by interested choirs.

There's much more to be said, and investigated, about Bonds and her work; some of the links above, especially the Kilgore dissertation and the brief online Randye Jones biography, are good starting points, as is the Song of America page on Bonds. I have a copy of Mildred Denby Green's Black Women Composers: A Genesis, which has more on Bonds, her teacher Florence Price and others, on the way, as well as an Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers, edited by Willis Patterson (published by Hal Leonard Corp.) that includes the score of Three Dream Portraits. I'm looking forward to seeing what I discover in this anthology, although I'll probably be studying the musical content of, rather than singing, the Dream Portraits, while searching for scores for the Songs of the Seasons and the Frost and Millay settings, which are not included in that anthology. But I'll stop here for now, and leave you to enjoy her music.

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Bach, Johannes-Passion, Bachchor und Orchester Hannover, Marktkirche

I attended a performance of J.S. Bach's Passion according to St. John (Johannespassion) by the  Hannover Bach Choir and Orchestra last night at the Marktkirche in the central market square of Hannover's old town. I may or may not have listened my way through this work on LP as a youngster, and probably did overhear it on the stereo growing up, but this is probably my first careful listen to the whole piece. (About two hours, no intermission though a brief episode of tuning between the two sections.)  A very rewarding if, obviously, fairly solemn two hours.  Really superb choral singing with the different vocal parts sufficiently distinct and the words very clear (well, especially with the aid of a program given my limited German) but the choir unified.  Remarkably dramatic effect when the choir portrays the crowds present at the high priest's and Pilate's interrogations of Jesus, contrasting with the choir's other main role as expressing Christian sentiments from a point of view that is not necessarily within the narrative aspect of the piece (but might also be taken so, as expressing another aspect of experience of some in the crowd).  The latter is usually in hymn-like chorales, but also often (as in the opening "Herr, unser Herrscher dessen Ruhm") in more complex and extended episodes with more involvement of the orchestra.  The visible wind instruments were baroque in appearance, there was a large lute, and I suspect the string section and most or all of the rest of the orchestra was original style instruments as well.  Tempos were relatively fast, and the resulting sound was excellent, though for some reason the orchestra came across with less clarity than the singers---the relatively reverberant acoustic of the tall, relatively open North German gothic brick hall church maybe having something to do with that. On balance I think the original instruments and the chosen tempos gave a somewhat rough, unprettified, but still accurate and well-played, effect that worked extremely well in the piece, accentuating its seriousness.  Some passages, in which the choir and orchestra engaged in extended contrapuntal reflection upon a dramatic development, or expression of the crowd's intention or reaction, with voices and instruments becoming a swirl of fast-moving harmonies and passing tones, attained an eerie and dramatic effect that reminded me of some twentieth century postserialism, maybe Ligeti or Penderecki.   The soloists were really excellent and did everything well.  Such a performance is definitely not about attention-getting individual vocals but all the soloists did have, in performances that were consistent throughout, some songs that really stood out in expressing key moments in the drama.   Alto Christian Rohrbach has a beautiful clear voice and delivered "Es ist vollbracht!" perfectly; the soprano soloist (either Miriam Meyer or Nadine Dilger; two sopranos are listed in the program) was especially affecting (though never overdoing it) with "Zerfließe, mein Herze" ("Dein Jesus ist tot!"); bass Albrecht Pohl did a great job of handling a variety of vocal tasks in combining the role of Pilate with many additional bass arias.  Johannes Strauß was especially outstanding as the Evangelist---he has an amazingly clear and beautiful tenor voice, deployed with perfect control.

Of course an extended piece like this with religious and dramatic aspects is an occasion for plenty of reflection on musical aspects of the piece but also on these in relation to the human condition.  One of the more interesting aspects of this piece for me was the amount of attention given to the political and social aspect of the story: the interaction with Pilate (I don't fully understand what's going on here yet), the issue about Jesus being called "King of the Jews" but asserting "My kingdom is not of this world", the high priest and the servant, and later the crowd after the exchange with Pilate "Shall I crucify your king?" "We have no King but the Emperor", calling for Jesus' crucifixion.  (There seems to be an emphasis on "the Jews" delivering Jesus to Pilate and calling for his crucifixion in this text.)

A superb, clear, controlled and well-thought-out performance and a perfect way to get better acquainted with this serious, reflective, many-faceted masterwork of Bach's.

Duke Ellington Sacred Concerts---Oxford University Jazz Orchestra and Schola Cantorum Oxford

Just came from an extraordinary concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in which the Oxford University Jazz Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford performed a version of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts, with two pieces from composer and baritone Roderick Williams' Oxford Blues Service inserted in the Sacred Concert running order.  This constituted the second half of the program; I'll perhaps write in another post about the first half, which featured many good things but a sound balance that was slightly problematic at times, with the band occasionally drowning out the excellent guest soloist, alto saxophonist Nigel Hitchcock.  (I can't allude to the first half, though, without mentioning the really superb singing of first-year Olivia Williams in "Lookin' Back" and "Feelin' Good".)  In the second half, the balance was suddenly almost perfect, the bass acoustic throughout, the swing consistent and unforced, and immediately with the meditative baritone saxophone solo, originally performed by Harry Carney, that introduces "In the Beginning God" we were immersed in Duke Ellington's world of sound and his personal take on religion and spirituality.  Besides the excellence of the band, choir, and soloists, the conducting and preparation of the musicians by Schola conductor James Burton was clearly crucial to the success of this performance.  Nigel Hitchcock's beautiful alto playing was another crucial ingredient, but the regular band members who played key solos, like the baritone sax in "In the Beginning", the clarinet in "Freedom", the plunger-muted trumpet in "The Shepherd" did themselves and the Duke proud as well.  The Roderick Williams pieces "Gray Skies Passing Over" and "The Lord's Prayer"  fit in perfectly, being in a somewhat harmonically lush jazz-to-mid-twentieth-century pop vocal style very similar to parts of the Ellington vocal score, but more contrapuntal, with, I think, an echo of English, and even perhaps Renaissance, church music.

Besides getting real swing from the ensemble, Burton kept things relaxed but accurate, with a real dynamic range, the band in balance with the soloists (Ellington's writing presumably helps here too), expressive phrasing and control over the pace and development of each piece.  "Freedom" was another standout, done with intense feeling and great energy, drawing roars of approval from the audience.  But all the movements were executed superbly, and there were many such moments.  The tap-dancing of Annette Walker, in "David Danced Before The Lord" was another highlight.

This was an utterly professional-sounding performance that felt infused with the passion of people who are together reaching a level they may or may not have reached before, in the zone, giving the audience a musical experience not to be forgotten.  The Sacred Concerts may be a work best experienced live---it was certainly immensely effective, enjoyable, powerful, and moving in this performance.  Bass player and alto Lila Chrisp who is in both groups apparently had the idea that they should join forces in this piece.  I'm very grateful to everyone involved for making this happen and really filling the Sheldonian with the spirit---especially the spirit of Duke Ellington and his band.

 

Des Américains à Paris

Via Ned Rorem, a really nice photo and audio montage promoting a program of a cappella choral music by some of Nadia Boulanger's American pupils: Ives, Copland, Bernstein, Barber, Stravinsky, Copland, Reich, Glass.   If I were in Luxembourg or deep Southwest France in March, I'd definitely go out of my way to hear this. High-resolution photos; it's worth making the video full-screen.