FOREWORD
About the Composer
Margaret Allison Bonds
(1913-72) stands as one of the more remarkable composers in twentieth-century
music – woman or man, Black or White.
Her mother was a musician who studied at
Chicago Musical College; her father, a doctor who also authored one of the
first published books for Black children and the lexicon Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (Jackson,
Tennessee, 1893). She grew up in a home that, while on the segregated Black
south side of Chicago, was relatively affluent and a cultural mecca for musicians
and other artists of color. 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
composition with Theodore Taylor of the Coleridge-Taylor Music School, as well
as Florence Price. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Northwestern
University, where she had to study in the basement of the library because of
her race. She earned a reputation for her social-justice activities on behalf
of African Americans, and her later interviews also emphasize the deeply sexist
nature of her world. 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.”[2] 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. Having traveled between New York City and Los Angeles for many years for her career, she
decided to relocate to Los Angeles after the death of her longtime friend and
collaborator Langston Hughes in 1967. She remained based there, composing,
collaborating, and concertizing, until her death in 1972.
About the Work
No Man Has Seen His Face is one
of two short sacred choruses and two sacred songs on the same texts that Bonds
composed in March, 1968. The words were written by Janice Lovoos (1903 – 2007),
herself a multifaceted artist, critic, and librettist, and a frequent
collaborator of Bonds. The autograph for the choral version of No Man Has Seen His Face is dated March
21, 1968, and on that same day Bonds also wrote two versions of the work for
solo voice with piano (high key and medium key).
Like Touch the Hem of His Garment [...],
this work reflects Bonds’s lifelong involvement with church singers and church
choirs, offering high-quality music that does not exceed the technical
abilities of proficient amateurs. It is also a consciously simple profession of
abiding faith – an admonition and reminder that God’s presence is everywhere,
and that because believers see that presence they must never doubt His
existence or, more importantly, His love. Bonds’s music is largely diatonic,
with plentiful major-seventh chords that reflect the influence of popular song
of the 1960s. Its unaffected style cohabitates with other features that subtly
bespeak her talents in the concert-music traditions – for example, the
treatment of the end of the B section
as an intensification of throbbing repeated chords that resolves with the
return to the tonic in m. 31, and the return of this heightened emotion at the
mention of divine mercy freely given (mm. 40ff). This combination of musical
quality with technical accessibility explains the respect Bonds commanded in
the musical world – despite her sex and her race –from the late 1930s until her
death.
About the Edition
This
edition generally presents Bonds’s music as she wrote it, differentiating
between authorial and editorial information. Editorial slurs are perforated,
and editorial dynamics, expressive markings, and tempos are presented in Roman
font with brackets. Editorial extensions of dynamic and expressive markings are
perforated and hooked at each end.
Four
sources for No Man Has Seen His Face survive,
all in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 7, folder 36):
AS 1: Autograph full score, 7
pp., headed “NO MAN HAS SEEN HIS FACE / SATB with piano accompaniment / and
Sop[rano] or Tenor Solo / Words by Janice Lovoos [space] Music by Margaret
Bonds.” At the end it bears the autograph inscription “March 21, 1968 / Home of
Thor and Janice Lovoos / Hollywood, Cal.” This manuscript includes autograph
pencil cues to pages 3-14 of another manuscript – suggesting, since AS 1 is only seven pages long, that
there is also another manuscript (now lost) of the work that is either scored
for larger ensemble or written on paper of a different format – both situations
that would require more paper for the same music. AS 1 also contains autograph pencil corrections that are not
incorporated into the other manuscripts, suggesting that it postdates them.
CS 1: Transfer-paper copy of
autograph full score, 7 pp. Although this manuscript concurs with AS 1 in most regards, it includes some
subtle variants (noted in the Critical
Notes below).
CS 2: Version for high voice
and piano, 4 pp.
CS 3: Version for medium
voice and piano, 4 pp., transposed to E-flat major.
Critical Notes: This
edition takes source AS 1 as its
copy-text. The tempo and style designation “Andantino – cantabile” is lacking
in both AS 1 and CS 1 and is adopted here from CS 2 and CS 3. Notes: Mm. 30-31, S/T solo:
b1 in CS1, CS 2, and CS 3, originally b1
in AS1, but crossed out and changed
to d2 in pencil; m. 39,
beat 4, T, B, Pf: f lacking in CS 1;
m. 40 Pf: LH slur lacking in CS 1; 43-44 , A, T, B: slur lacking in CS 1 in 43, but completion included
after the system break to m. 44.
Acknowledgments
First
and foremost, I thank the family of Margaret Bonds for their permission to
publish these materials. Thanks are also due to the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University for granting access to the autographs
used for this edition. I also thank Elinor Armsby and Nancy Hale at Hildegard
Publishing Company for their interest in this project and for shepherding it
through the publishing process. Finally, I thank my family for their patience
and support unending.
– Michael Cooper
