Margaret A. Bonds, African American Composer & Pianist Born March 3, 1913

Margaret Allison Richardson Bonds was an African American composer, pianist and musical director who was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 3, 1913. Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma, Professor of Music at Lawrence University has kindly made his research entry on Margaret Bonds available to AfriClassical.com: “She was born in Chicago as Margaret Jeanette Allison Majors to Dr. Monroe Majors and Estella C. Bonds...”. “Her parents separated in 1915 and, when her parents divorced in 1917, her mother resumed her birth name, assigning this also to her daughter.” “By the time she had begun the study of composition in 1926 with Chicago newcomers William Dawson and Florence Price (with whom she also studied piano), she was a charter member of the Junior Music Division of the National Association of Negro Musicians, and had been a student at the Coleridge-Taylor Music School, where her mother and Tom Theodore Taylor served on the faculty.” Bonds entered Northwestern University at 16, in 1929, and studied piano and composition. Dr. De Lerma continues: “A Rosenwald Scholarship was awarded for graduate study at Northwestern in 1933, when she had been awarded the B.M. degree.”

Prof. Rae Linda Brown wrote the liner notes for the CD Black Diamonds: Althea Waites Plays Music By African-American Composers, Cambria 1097 (1993): “Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) achieved national recognition when she won the Wanamaker Prize in 1932 for the song Sea Ghost, the same contest in which her teacher, Florence Price, received her coveted awards.” Dr. De Lerma relates: “She gave her debut in Town Hall on 7 February 1932...”. “She was pianist with the Chicago Women’s Orchestra the next year in the D minor concerto of Florence Price, conducted by Ebba Sundstrom and broadcast on CBS. She now had her M.M. degree from Northwestern (1934) and had already performed John Alden Carpenter’s concertino with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, with Frederick Stock as conductor.”

A look at AfriClassical posts on Margaret Bonds in the past year shows her music is very much a part of contemporary performances and recordings. On June 8, 2008 we wrote of Gerald Blanchard's new CD With A Song In My Heart, which includes The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Bonds, Blue Griffin Records BGR 117. An Aug. 21, 2008 post announced “Art Song: 56^th Annual Noon Concert Series” at U.C. Berkeley, at which music of Margaret Bonds was among the works performed by Angela Arnold, soprano; and Jeffrey Sykes, piano. Others who performed the composer's works last year included Lesa Terry and the Women's Jazz Orchestra, and the Berklee College of Music. We also posted a review of Vol. 4 of Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Dr. William Chapman Nyaho and including music of Margaret Bonds.