Biography
Margaret Bonds earned widespread recognition in her era for her work as a composer, pianist, and educator. In 1933 she became the first black soloist to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an occasion later noted as a landmark of black pride in the nation’s cultural record. Despite this visibility, credit for her best-known contribution—an arrangement and setting of the gospel hymn “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”—was rarely granted to her; the version heard worldwide is routinely treated as an anonymous traditional piece, yet it is in fact her complete handiwork. Bonds also produced scores for choir, orchestra, and piano, as well as individual songs that spanned popular and art-song idioms. From the 1920s onward she stood at the center of three decades of innovation in black classical music, a phrase that then embraced jazz, gospel, and concert traditions alike. Although the famous hymn slipped from her acknowledged catalog, the bulk of her output remains readily obtainable in published editions. Her most celebrated art-song cycle, “Three Dream Portraits,” draws on poems by Langston Hughes and first appeared in print in 1959.
Bonds began her training under her mother, Estella C. Bonds, later studying piano with Florence B. Price and composition with William Dawson. By age twenty-one she had completed both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northwestern University. She continued at the Juilliard School with instructors Tobert Storer, Henry Levine, Roy Harris, and Emerson Harper. Throughout the latter half of the 1930s she maintained an intense schedule that encompassed both concert and vernacular genres. A scholarship awarded by the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1939 supported her efforts; the next year she collaborated on the buoyant tune “Peach Tree Street,” later recorded by Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman among others. As a pianist and instructor she commanded respect in Chicago and New York until the mid-1960s, counting composer Ned Rorem among her students. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles, where she turned to film scoring and joined the Inner City Institute and Repertory Theater. Her closest collaborator remained Langston Hughes; together they created numerous songs and stage works, among them the musical Shakespeare in Harlem and the cantata “Ballad of the Brown King.” That same year she received the Northwestern University alumni medal. Shortly after her death in 1972, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra under Zubin Mehta presented her “Credo” for baritone, chorus, and orchestra.
Bonds began her training under her mother, Estella C. Bonds, later studying piano with Florence B. Price and composition with William Dawson. By age twenty-one she had completed both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northwestern University. She continued at the Juilliard School with instructors Tobert Storer, Henry Levine, Roy Harris, and Emerson Harper. Throughout the latter half of the 1930s she maintained an intense schedule that encompassed both concert and vernacular genres. A scholarship awarded by the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1939 supported her efforts; the next year she collaborated on the buoyant tune “Peach Tree Street,” later recorded by Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman among others. As a pianist and instructor she commanded respect in Chicago and New York until the mid-1960s, counting composer Ned Rorem among her students. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles, where she turned to film scoring and joined the Inner City Institute and Repertory Theater. Her closest collaborator remained Langston Hughes; together they created numerous songs and stage works, among them the musical Shakespeare in Harlem and the cantata “Ballad of the Brown King.” That same year she received the Northwestern University alumni medal. Shortly after her death in 1972, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra under Zubin Mehta presented her “Credo” for baritone, chorus, and orchestra.
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