By Scot Hanna-Weir
John Michael Cooper writes about Margaret Bonds in the preface to his edition of the Credo:
Few individuals in music’s history have been more assiduous as lifelong advocates for racial justice and social justice generally than Margaret Allison Bonds (1913-72). Her mother was a musician who studied at Chicago Musical College, and her father was the author of one of the first published books for Black children as well as the 1893 lexicon Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. These parental profiles exerted a powerful formative influence on Margaret: she grew up in a home that, while on the segregated Black south side of Chicago, was not only relatively affluent, but also a cultural mecca for musicians and other artists of color and acutely aware of the ethical and moral imperative for racial justice.
That background paid off in her work. By the age of eight she had been taking piano lessons for several years and written her first composition, and by the time she entered Northwestern University in 1929 she had studied piano and perhaps also composition with Theodore Taylor of the Coleridge-Taylor Music School, as well as Florence Price. She took the long commute by train to Northwestern University, where she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano and composition and, because of her race, studied in the basement of the University library; it was in that basement that she first encountered the poetry of Langston Hughes, a lifelong friend, who would eventually persuade her to move to New York and become a part of that city’s thriving African American intellectual and cultural community. In Chicago and New York she earned a reputation for her social-justice activities on behalf of African Americans, and especially young African Americans, composing prolifically, teaching gratis lessons at youth centers, working as a public speaker, and generally laboring to enfranchise Black Americans in the U. S. cultural life in a variety of ways. Her later interviews also emphasize the profoundly sexist nature of her world, including within the professions of concert music. In a 1964 interview with The Washington Post, she proclaimed:
By 1967 her renown was so great that Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley proclaimed January 31 of that year as the city’s official Margaret Bonds Day. After Langston Hughes’ death she relocated permanently to Los Angeles, where she composed, concertized, and wrote music of virtually every variety.
Bonds’ frequent travels made it difficult for her to maintain an organized library of her manuscripts; so when she died suddenly and intestate, her husband and daughter simply gathered the papers that were in her Los Angeles apartment. The bulk of the papers her husband secured ended up in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, while those secured by her daughter ultimately landed in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections in the Georgetown University Libraries (Washington, D. C.). The latter papers – which were nearly lost after they failed to sell and ended up next to a dumpster after a book fair – contains the vitally important sources for the Credo that served as the basis of the present edition.
This evening’s performance seeks to contextualize Bonds’ Credo with a collection of intellectual connections and synergies, including a number of Bonds’ other works that allows us to experience the deep and vibrant tapestry that this work is a part of. Her deep association, collaborations, and friendship with Langston Hughes for instance are central to a number of the pieces in the first half of the program. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work not only represents a compositional lineage but connects to the Coleridge-Taylor Music School where she began her compositional studies. And certainly her connections with the spiritual repertoire and her own arrangements and inspirations from these pieces is a commonality with many other composers who were her contemporaries like Undine Smith Moore, as well as those like Shawn Okpebholo who are writing today.
The instrumentation of the new arrangement of Bonds’ Credo with organ, brass, and percussion was also a launching off point for several of our pieces on the program, and this is particularly true of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Antiphon. Vaughan Williams was actually a classmate of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (featured later in the program) at the Royal College of Music in London, and in spite of his own religious beliefs that he later described as “cheerful agnosticism” did not shy away from sacred texts like the mystical poems of 16th century poet George Herbert. The fifth of the five mystical songs, Antiphon adds an optional SATB chorus and because of this scoring, the movement has often been excerpted as an anthem for choir alone, including in this arrangement for organ, brass, and timpani. The text is declamatory and jubilant: “Let all the world in every corner sing!”, and celebrates a world in which there is no reach beyond the praise of God.
Jeffrey Derus’ I Dream a World is the first of our Hughes settings. Following the bombastic Vaughan Williams, the Derus is contemplative with a rocking piano accompaniment that certainly creates a dreamlike sound world. Hughes’ text is optimistic, but also clearly acknowledges that we dream of a world that does not yet exist.
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind–
Of such I dream, my world!
Following the Derus is Bonds’ own setting of Hughes in her four song cycle, Songs of the Seasons. Alethea Kilgore, associate professor of vocal studies at Florida A&M University, describes this early song cycle and its importance in Bonds’ body of work:
Bonds compiled her second song cycle, Songs of the Seasons, for a commission arranged by tenor Lawrence Watson in 1955. This cycle included “Poème d’automne” and “Winter Moon”, composed in 1934 and 1936 respectively, along with “Young Love in Spring” and “Summer Storm,” composed in 1955. The premiere of this cycle was performed by Watson on March 25, 1956, at Town Hall.
Since the first known art songs composed by Margaret Bonds (“Sea Ghost” and “Sleep Song” composed in 1932, and the first version of “To a Brown Girl, Dead” composed in 1933) have not been located, “Poème d’automne” is the earliest known extant art song. The premiere of “Poème d’automne” took place over twenty years prior to the premiere of Songs of the Seasons, on April 15, 1934, at the Abraham Lincoln Centre in Chicago.
In spite of the chasm in time between the first two pieces in the set and the last two pieces, the set exists beautifully together. In all of her settings of texts, and particularly those of Hughes, Bonds’ incredible appreciation for the meaning of the text and the sound world that it evokes shines through. Harmonically, all four works are quite adventurous with harmony pulled out of jazz and blues alongside angular and challenging melodies, all packaged within beautifully thoughtful emotional portrayals of the themes of each poem. Poème is languid and haunting while Winter Moon is incredibly still and quiet. Young love scampers across the voice and the keyboard playfully and Summer Storm is assertive and powerful.
Contemporary composer Rosephanye Powell also has an incredible affinity for the treatment of Hughes texts. Her To Sit and Dream, sets another of Hughes’ dreams (titled “To You”), though this one less specific than “I Dream a World”. This dream to read and learn about the world, is also a call to action. “Unfettered free–help me! All you who are dreamers, too. Help me to make our world anew.” Powell’s setting employs long swaths of space to allow for contemplation at both the beginning and end of the piece, keeping the chorus quite soft and distant. But in the middle section the choir comes alive with the call to action and then repeats as a mantra “I reach out my hand [originally “dreams” in the poem] to you.”
Bonds had a long appreciation of the writings of Hughes before they met in person in 1936 at the home of a mutual friend. Later in life she reflected on her experience of finding Hughes’ writings while in her first year as a music student at Northwestern University.
I was in this prejudiced university, 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 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.
It seems no great surprise that The Negro Speaks of Rivers was then one of the first poems by Hughes that Bonds set. When Bonds published Rivers in 1942, she dedicated it to Marian Anderson. Apparently, the “jazzy augmented chords” were not to the liking of Anderson, so Etta Moten (who originated the role of Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess) had the honor of premiering the work. Both Hughes and Bonds actively promoted Rivers, including it in many of their musicales, performances of poetry and song, and setting it in multiple choral arrangements.
During the Civil Rights movement, Bonds took an active role in promoting African-American artists by sponsoring concerts and curating exhibitions that featured the works black composers and poets. Additionally she established The Margaret Bonds Chamber Music Society which sought to canonize the work of these black artists. For instance, in October of 1956, one such “Annual Musicale” entitled “Music of the Negro Composer” featured spiritual arrangements (for voice and string quartet) by William Lawrence and John Work; art songs by William Grant Still, Harry T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Lawrence, Hall Johnson, Clarence Cameron White, Carl Diton, and Margaret Bonds; and a String Quartet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Coleridge-Taylor, while not an American composer, was certainly deeply admired by African Americans. He made three visits to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910 and also attended the First Pan-African Conference in London where he met leading American intellectuals including Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois. His compositional output is expansive from his large scale works, like the three choral-orchestral cantatas based on the 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to his more intimate compositions like the anthem presented tonight, O Ye That Love the Lord.
Undine Smith Moore’s anthem, I Would be True, sets the text of an American Congregationalist minister, author, and hymnwriter, Harold A. Walter. Walter’s poem, originally titled My Creed, touches on another unifying idea in this concert – statements of belief. Bonds’ Credo sets a non-liturgical credo by W. E. B. Du Bois written in 1904. Here and in Pärt’s setting of the Beatitudes, the structure of these texts creates much of the structure of the composition. Moore’s setting leaves the majority of the text to the tenors and basses, often mirroring the entering figure just as the poetic text sets up a similar structure at the beginning of each line:
I would be true, for there are those who trust me;
I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
I would be friend of all – the foe, the friendless;
I would be giving, and forget the gift,
I would be humble, for I know my weakness,
I would look up, and love, and laugh and lift.
Arvo Pärt’s setting of The Beatitudes, text from Matthew 5:3-12 is typical of his austere and haunting vocal writing. Often identified with the minimalist movement, Pärt uses a technique he describes as tintinnabuli in which one or more voices move primarily in stepwise directions while one or more other voices arpeggiate a chord. In this setting, the sopranos and tenors arpeggiate and the altos and basses move stepwise. The result is many surprising dissonances that Pärt strategically employs at key moments in the text. The choir sings in rhythmic unison throughout the piece, evoking an almost chant-like quality with occasional punctuations from the pedal of the organ. The full resources of the organ are not revealed until the final “amen” of the piece, after which, the organ concludes with a series of rapid chord arpeggiations that gradually fade to nothingness. Like the Moore, the piece is its own credo in a way – certainly a statement of belief and definitely similar in structure with the methodical text setting.
Terence Blanchard’s landmark opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, sets Charles M. Blow’s memoir in which the author recounts his attempts to find love and to heal from childhood trauma. This abuse is both personal and the “background of dire poverty of Blow’s rural Black community–embedded in the visible and unseen systems of class and race that perpetuated that poverty.” This work was the first opera by a Black composer performed at the Met and continues in the legacy of Margaret Bonds in capturing aspects of the Black experience through art music. Similarly to Bonds, Blanchard, an eight-time GRAMMY winner, incorporates a variety of styles and genres into his expansive writing and deals directly with challenging themes that are both deeply personal and operate at large societal levels.
Similarly to Blanchard, Shawn Okpebholo continues in the tradition of the brilliant composers who came before him. A Nigerian-American composer, he is perhaps best known for his reimagining of Negro spirituals like this version of Steal Away. In this arrangement, the traditional tune is treated with an extended and emotionally rich harmonic accompaniment, as well as a number of embellishments in the vocal line that heighten the powerful emotion encapsulated in this spiritual.
To conclude the first half, we return to Margaret Bonds with her arrangement of He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand. Originally arranged for voice and piano, and performed by Scot Hanna-Weir and Marlissa Hudson when she last performed with the Chorale in 2014, tonight’s version is presented in a new arrangement matching this new scoring of the Credo.
* * *
In the second half, the focus is the Credo. While traditional latin Credo’s have a long history of choral performance as a part of the Latin Mass which has been set by almost innumerable composers, the W. E. B. Du Bois’ Credo text is quite different. Du Bois certainly drew on the Latin Credo for structure, beginning each of the nine articles with “I believe in…”, but while the Latin mass believes in “one God, father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”, the Du Bois Credo immediately centers itself in a message of racial justice:
I BELIEVE in God who made of one blood all races that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.
Written in 1904, this text remains remarkably poignant in our present day. For instance, in the sixth movement, the baritone sings:
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in the kingdom of beauty and love.
This echoes some of the same sentiments of the Hughes I Dream a World and continues to speak to the racial justice sought now in our society where violence continues to be perpetrated disproportionately on people of color. This contemporary resonance of a work from over a century ago speaks not only to the brilliance of its original conception, but also to the long term struggle that racial justice continues to be in our society and to the importance of this continued work.
John Michael Cooper further writes about the Credo:
Precisely when Margaret Bonds first came into contact with the Credo of W. E. B. Du Bois is not currently known. Du Bois was one of the great luminaries of the early twentieth century’s Civil Rights movement in the U. S. – a brilliant, eloquent, and prolific author, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and founding editor of the widely circulated journal The Crisis. The text of the Credo, one of the most iconic texts of the Civil Rights movement before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is a masterpiece of a strategy of dual-perspective: its verbiage of racial harmony and scriptural imagery of children in green pastures beside still waters – language designed to convince skeptical Whites that Du Bois was committed to a racial harmony founded in the Judeo-Christian institutions that they professed to adhere to – is nested in a fierce pride in Black lineage and self, condemnation of war, and (most importantly) the overarching thesis that racial equality and justice were things that were divinely ordained, not granted by humans (let alone White society). It was first published in New York newspaper The Independent on October 6, 1904 and reprinted as a prologue to Du Bois’ first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920).
The first complete surviving incarnation of the Credo was the piano-vocal setting. That version was complete by 1965, and was premiered by Bonds’ friend Frederick Wilkerson in Washington, D. C., on March 12, 1967. The orchestral version was begun, according to a discarded draft, in January 1966. This version was premiered in 1967 alongside the Montgomery Variations, then performed in excerpt by Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on May 21, 1972, and then in its entirety by the Compton Civic Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Jubilee Singers under the direction of Hans Lampl on April 29, 1973.
The Credo is a masterpiece. Even a cursory consideration will note Bonds’ virtuosity in meeting the formidable challenges of setting prose (rather than poetry) to music, the work’s wide emotional range, its ingenious orchestration, its alternately beautiful and powerful melodic language, and its rich harmonic palette. Even more significant from a compositional and interpretive point of view is Bonds’ brilliant translation of the underlying large-scale concept of Du Bois’ text into a large-scale musical cycle. She groups the nine separate articles of the text into two large sections. She groups the nine separate articles of the text into two large sections, combining articles 3 and 4 and 7 and 8 into single movements. The work as a whole is a cycle in A minor, with central tonal axes of D minor and F major, and its large-scale cyclical unity is underscored by a rich network of thematic and motivic recollections. Taken together, these interrelationships confirm that the Credo is not not merely an assemblage of professed beliefs, but rather a profoundly unified vision that reaffirms the beauty of Blackness and the sanctity of those professions’ overarching theme of racial justice.
The Credo concludes with a final statement of belief:
Finally, I believe in Patience – patience with the weakness of the Weak and the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and the ignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and the mad chastening of Sorrow; – patience with God!
In this way, the work returns both to the divine nature of equality that it begins with but with the firm acknowledgement of how far our society continues to be from this ideal. We still need to, as Hughes wrote, dream a world where this is possible. It seemed that Bonds, over sixty years after Du Bois believed in patience, also believed in patience. But, her final setting of “patience with God” is quite insistent. Now, another sixty years have passed and the urgency of her “patience with God” could not be more firmly felt.
John Michael Cooper writes about Margaret Bonds in the preface to his edition of the Credo:
Few individuals in music’s history have been more assiduous as lifelong advocates for racial justice and social justice generally than Margaret Allison Bonds (1913-72). Her mother was a musician who studied at Chicago Musical College, and her father was the author of one of the first published books for Black children as well as the 1893 lexicon Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. These parental profiles exerted a powerful formative influence on Margaret: she grew up in a home that, while on the segregated Black south side of Chicago, was not only relatively affluent, but also a cultural mecca for musicians and other artists of color and acutely aware of the ethical and moral imperative for racial justice.
That background paid off in her work. By the age of eight she had been taking piano lessons for several years and written her first composition, and by the time she entered Northwestern University in 1929 she had studied piano and perhaps also composition with Theodore Taylor of the Coleridge-Taylor Music School, as well as Florence Price. She took the long commute by train to Northwestern University, where she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano and composition and, because of her race, studied in the basement of the University library; it was in that basement that she first encountered the poetry of Langston Hughes, a lifelong friend, who would eventually persuade her to move to New York and become a part of that city’s thriving African American intellectual and cultural community. In Chicago and New York she earned a reputation for her social-justice activities on behalf of African Americans, and especially young African Americans, composing prolifically, teaching gratis lessons at youth centers, working as a public speaker, and generally laboring to enfranchise Black Americans in the U. S. cultural life in a variety of ways. Her later interviews also emphasize the profoundly sexist nature of her world, including within the professions of concert music. In a 1964 interview with The Washington Post, she proclaimed:
- I am a musician and a humanitarian… People don’t really think a woman can compete in this field [of concert music]... Women are expected to be wives, mothers and do all the nasty things in the community (Oh, I do them), and if a woman is cursed with talent, too, then she keeps apologizing for it.
By 1967 her renown was so great that Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley proclaimed January 31 of that year as the city’s official Margaret Bonds Day. After Langston Hughes’ death she relocated permanently to Los Angeles, where she composed, concertized, and wrote music of virtually every variety.
Bonds’ frequent travels made it difficult for her to maintain an organized library of her manuscripts; so when she died suddenly and intestate, her husband and daughter simply gathered the papers that were in her Los Angeles apartment. The bulk of the papers her husband secured ended up in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, while those secured by her daughter ultimately landed in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections in the Georgetown University Libraries (Washington, D. C.). The latter papers – which were nearly lost after they failed to sell and ended up next to a dumpster after a book fair – contains the vitally important sources for the Credo that served as the basis of the present edition.
This evening’s performance seeks to contextualize Bonds’ Credo with a collection of intellectual connections and synergies, including a number of Bonds’ other works that allows us to experience the deep and vibrant tapestry that this work is a part of. Her deep association, collaborations, and friendship with Langston Hughes for instance are central to a number of the pieces in the first half of the program. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work not only represents a compositional lineage but connects to the Coleridge-Taylor Music School where she began her compositional studies. And certainly her connections with the spiritual repertoire and her own arrangements and inspirations from these pieces is a commonality with many other composers who were her contemporaries like Undine Smith Moore, as well as those like Shawn Okpebholo who are writing today.
The instrumentation of the new arrangement of Bonds’ Credo with organ, brass, and percussion was also a launching off point for several of our pieces on the program, and this is particularly true of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Antiphon. Vaughan Williams was actually a classmate of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (featured later in the program) at the Royal College of Music in London, and in spite of his own religious beliefs that he later described as “cheerful agnosticism” did not shy away from sacred texts like the mystical poems of 16th century poet George Herbert. The fifth of the five mystical songs, Antiphon adds an optional SATB chorus and because of this scoring, the movement has often been excerpted as an anthem for choir alone, including in this arrangement for organ, brass, and timpani. The text is declamatory and jubilant: “Let all the world in every corner sing!”, and celebrates a world in which there is no reach beyond the praise of God.
Jeffrey Derus’ I Dream a World is the first of our Hughes settings. Following the bombastic Vaughan Williams, the Derus is contemplative with a rocking piano accompaniment that certainly creates a dreamlike sound world. Hughes’ text is optimistic, but also clearly acknowledges that we dream of a world that does not yet exist.
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind–
Of such I dream, my world!
Following the Derus is Bonds’ own setting of Hughes in her four song cycle, Songs of the Seasons. Alethea Kilgore, associate professor of vocal studies at Florida A&M University, describes this early song cycle and its importance in Bonds’ body of work:
Bonds compiled her second song cycle, Songs of the Seasons, for a commission arranged by tenor Lawrence Watson in 1955. This cycle included “Poème d’automne” and “Winter Moon”, composed in 1934 and 1936 respectively, along with “Young Love in Spring” and “Summer Storm,” composed in 1955. The premiere of this cycle was performed by Watson on March 25, 1956, at Town Hall.
Since the first known art songs composed by Margaret Bonds (“Sea Ghost” and “Sleep Song” composed in 1932, and the first version of “To a Brown Girl, Dead” composed in 1933) have not been located, “Poème d’automne” is the earliest known extant art song. The premiere of “Poème d’automne” took place over twenty years prior to the premiere of Songs of the Seasons, on April 15, 1934, at the Abraham Lincoln Centre in Chicago.
In spite of the chasm in time between the first two pieces in the set and the last two pieces, the set exists beautifully together. In all of her settings of texts, and particularly those of Hughes, Bonds’ incredible appreciation for the meaning of the text and the sound world that it evokes shines through. Harmonically, all four works are quite adventurous with harmony pulled out of jazz and blues alongside angular and challenging melodies, all packaged within beautifully thoughtful emotional portrayals of the themes of each poem. Poème is languid and haunting while Winter Moon is incredibly still and quiet. Young love scampers across the voice and the keyboard playfully and Summer Storm is assertive and powerful.
Contemporary composer Rosephanye Powell also has an incredible affinity for the treatment of Hughes texts. Her To Sit and Dream, sets another of Hughes’ dreams (titled “To You”), though this one less specific than “I Dream a World”. This dream to read and learn about the world, is also a call to action. “Unfettered free–help me! All you who are dreamers, too. Help me to make our world anew.” Powell’s setting employs long swaths of space to allow for contemplation at both the beginning and end of the piece, keeping the chorus quite soft and distant. But in the middle section the choir comes alive with the call to action and then repeats as a mantra “I reach out my hand [originally “dreams” in the poem] to you.”
Bonds had a long appreciation of the writings of Hughes before they met in person in 1936 at the home of a mutual friend. Later in life she reflected on her experience of finding Hughes’ writings while in her first year as a music student at Northwestern University.
I was in this prejudiced university, 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 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.
It seems no great surprise that The Negro Speaks of Rivers was then one of the first poems by Hughes that Bonds set. When Bonds published Rivers in 1942, she dedicated it to Marian Anderson. Apparently, the “jazzy augmented chords” were not to the liking of Anderson, so Etta Moten (who originated the role of Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess) had the honor of premiering the work. Both Hughes and Bonds actively promoted Rivers, including it in many of their musicales, performances of poetry and song, and setting it in multiple choral arrangements.
During the Civil Rights movement, Bonds took an active role in promoting African-American artists by sponsoring concerts and curating exhibitions that featured the works black composers and poets. Additionally she established The Margaret Bonds Chamber Music Society which sought to canonize the work of these black artists. For instance, in October of 1956, one such “Annual Musicale” entitled “Music of the Negro Composer” featured spiritual arrangements (for voice and string quartet) by William Lawrence and John Work; art songs by William Grant Still, Harry T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Lawrence, Hall Johnson, Clarence Cameron White, Carl Diton, and Margaret Bonds; and a String Quartet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Coleridge-Taylor, while not an American composer, was certainly deeply admired by African Americans. He made three visits to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910 and also attended the First Pan-African Conference in London where he met leading American intellectuals including Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois. His compositional output is expansive from his large scale works, like the three choral-orchestral cantatas based on the 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to his more intimate compositions like the anthem presented tonight, O Ye That Love the Lord.
Undine Smith Moore’s anthem, I Would be True, sets the text of an American Congregationalist minister, author, and hymnwriter, Harold A. Walter. Walter’s poem, originally titled My Creed, touches on another unifying idea in this concert – statements of belief. Bonds’ Credo sets a non-liturgical credo by W. E. B. Du Bois written in 1904. Here and in Pärt’s setting of the Beatitudes, the structure of these texts creates much of the structure of the composition. Moore’s setting leaves the majority of the text to the tenors and basses, often mirroring the entering figure just as the poetic text sets up a similar structure at the beginning of each line:
I would be true, for there are those who trust me;
I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
I would be friend of all – the foe, the friendless;
I would be giving, and forget the gift,
I would be humble, for I know my weakness,
I would look up, and love, and laugh and lift.
Arvo Pärt’s setting of The Beatitudes, text from Matthew 5:3-12 is typical of his austere and haunting vocal writing. Often identified with the minimalist movement, Pärt uses a technique he describes as tintinnabuli in which one or more voices move primarily in stepwise directions while one or more other voices arpeggiate a chord. In this setting, the sopranos and tenors arpeggiate and the altos and basses move stepwise. The result is many surprising dissonances that Pärt strategically employs at key moments in the text. The choir sings in rhythmic unison throughout the piece, evoking an almost chant-like quality with occasional punctuations from the pedal of the organ. The full resources of the organ are not revealed until the final “amen” of the piece, after which, the organ concludes with a series of rapid chord arpeggiations that gradually fade to nothingness. Like the Moore, the piece is its own credo in a way – certainly a statement of belief and definitely similar in structure with the methodical text setting.
Terence Blanchard’s landmark opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, sets Charles M. Blow’s memoir in which the author recounts his attempts to find love and to heal from childhood trauma. This abuse is both personal and the “background of dire poverty of Blow’s rural Black community–embedded in the visible and unseen systems of class and race that perpetuated that poverty.” This work was the first opera by a Black composer performed at the Met and continues in the legacy of Margaret Bonds in capturing aspects of the Black experience through art music. Similarly to Bonds, Blanchard, an eight-time GRAMMY winner, incorporates a variety of styles and genres into his expansive writing and deals directly with challenging themes that are both deeply personal and operate at large societal levels.
Similarly to Blanchard, Shawn Okpebholo continues in the tradition of the brilliant composers who came before him. A Nigerian-American composer, he is perhaps best known for his reimagining of Negro spirituals like this version of Steal Away. In this arrangement, the traditional tune is treated with an extended and emotionally rich harmonic accompaniment, as well as a number of embellishments in the vocal line that heighten the powerful emotion encapsulated in this spiritual.
To conclude the first half, we return to Margaret Bonds with her arrangement of He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand. Originally arranged for voice and piano, and performed by Scot Hanna-Weir and Marlissa Hudson when she last performed with the Chorale in 2014, tonight’s version is presented in a new arrangement matching this new scoring of the Credo.
* * *
In the second half, the focus is the Credo. While traditional latin Credo’s have a long history of choral performance as a part of the Latin Mass which has been set by almost innumerable composers, the W. E. B. Du Bois’ Credo text is quite different. Du Bois certainly drew on the Latin Credo for structure, beginning each of the nine articles with “I believe in…”, but while the Latin mass believes in “one God, father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”, the Du Bois Credo immediately centers itself in a message of racial justice:
I BELIEVE in God who made of one blood all races that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.
Written in 1904, this text remains remarkably poignant in our present day. For instance, in the sixth movement, the baritone sings:
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in the kingdom of beauty and love.
This echoes some of the same sentiments of the Hughes I Dream a World and continues to speak to the racial justice sought now in our society where violence continues to be perpetrated disproportionately on people of color. This contemporary resonance of a work from over a century ago speaks not only to the brilliance of its original conception, but also to the long term struggle that racial justice continues to be in our society and to the importance of this continued work.
John Michael Cooper further writes about the Credo:
Precisely when Margaret Bonds first came into contact with the Credo of W. E. B. Du Bois is not currently known. Du Bois was one of the great luminaries of the early twentieth century’s Civil Rights movement in the U. S. – a brilliant, eloquent, and prolific author, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and founding editor of the widely circulated journal The Crisis. The text of the Credo, one of the most iconic texts of the Civil Rights movement before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is a masterpiece of a strategy of dual-perspective: its verbiage of racial harmony and scriptural imagery of children in green pastures beside still waters – language designed to convince skeptical Whites that Du Bois was committed to a racial harmony founded in the Judeo-Christian institutions that they professed to adhere to – is nested in a fierce pride in Black lineage and self, condemnation of war, and (most importantly) the overarching thesis that racial equality and justice were things that were divinely ordained, not granted by humans (let alone White society). It was first published in New York newspaper The Independent on October 6, 1904 and reprinted as a prologue to Du Bois’ first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920).
The first complete surviving incarnation of the Credo was the piano-vocal setting. That version was complete by 1965, and was premiered by Bonds’ friend Frederick Wilkerson in Washington, D. C., on March 12, 1967. The orchestral version was begun, according to a discarded draft, in January 1966. This version was premiered in 1967 alongside the Montgomery Variations, then performed in excerpt by Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on May 21, 1972, and then in its entirety by the Compton Civic Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Jubilee Singers under the direction of Hans Lampl on April 29, 1973.
The Credo is a masterpiece. Even a cursory consideration will note Bonds’ virtuosity in meeting the formidable challenges of setting prose (rather than poetry) to music, the work’s wide emotional range, its ingenious orchestration, its alternately beautiful and powerful melodic language, and its rich harmonic palette. Even more significant from a compositional and interpretive point of view is Bonds’ brilliant translation of the underlying large-scale concept of Du Bois’ text into a large-scale musical cycle. She groups the nine separate articles of the text into two large sections. She groups the nine separate articles of the text into two large sections, combining articles 3 and 4 and 7 and 8 into single movements. The work as a whole is a cycle in A minor, with central tonal axes of D minor and F major, and its large-scale cyclical unity is underscored by a rich network of thematic and motivic recollections. Taken together, these interrelationships confirm that the Credo is not not merely an assemblage of professed beliefs, but rather a profoundly unified vision that reaffirms the beauty of Blackness and the sanctity of those professions’ overarching theme of racial justice.
The Credo concludes with a final statement of belief:
Finally, I believe in Patience – patience with the weakness of the Weak and the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and the ignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and the mad chastening of Sorrow; – patience with God!
In this way, the work returns both to the divine nature of equality that it begins with but with the firm acknowledgement of how far our society continues to be from this ideal. We still need to, as Hughes wrote, dream a world where this is possible. It seemed that Bonds, over sixty years after Du Bois believed in patience, also believed in patience. But, her final setting of “patience with God” is quite insistent. Now, another sixty years have passed and the urgency of her “patience with God” could not be more firmly felt.
