Performances by Greg Watkins and Members of the CAAPA Chorale, November 14, 2021; and Anton Nel and Members of Conspirare, February 15,...

[This post is about two compositions of Margaret Bonds that are gaining a new foothold on modern musical life. One is a short but...

A Teacher Bids a Fond Farewell (for now) to His Fine Students and an Adventurous Course [Background: Yesterday was the last regular class...

African Dance, on a Text by Langston Hughes, Gets Its Posthumous Premiere This Weekend On Sunday, November 14, 2021, Greg Watkins and the...

The Minnesota Orchestra Has Recorded an Orchestral Masterpiece by Margaret Bonds [Update 11/13/21: The Minnesota Orchestra's recording is...

With a Playlist Before 1934, Margaret Bonds publicly programmed only all-White recitals. After 1934 she never did that again. Why the...

Langston Hughes’s relationship with the Christian church was . . . complicated. Except that it wasn’t. While he acknowledged that the...

YESTERDAY I LEARNED that Elaine Fine, whose arrangement of the now-quite-popular Adoration for violin or viola with piano remains the...

This post is a short one, but I hope you’ll find it interesting. In an earlier post I remarked that Florence Price had submitted all four...

Gustavo Dudamel to Conduct Margaret Bonds’s Montgomery Variations in July, 2021 This past weekend was filled with plenty of grim news –...

Florence Price’s First Symphony, the 1933-34 World’s Fair, and Three Tribbles (corrected) In Part 1 of this three-part post, I suggested...

Florence Price’s First Symphony, the 1933-34 World’s Fair, and Three Tribbles In the first part of this post I talked about the context...

Florence Price’s First Symphony, the 1933-34 World’s Fair, and Three Tribbles Never in my career of writing did I expect that one day I...

Florence B. Price’s “Night” (Text by Bessie Mayle) The poetry, music, and other artworks of the Harlem Renaissance and Chicago Black...

A Recitation of Her Unpublished Song of Hope [updated Feb. 28, 2021] Sometime in 1930, Florence B. Price (1887-1953) wrote a poem titled...

Maeve Brophy and one of the Seven Descriptive Pieces for Piano Solo (1927-28) [Updated 15 February 2021] A month or so ago I published...

Resurrecting a Blacklisted Musical Affirmation of Freedom from 1976 in 2021 [Update (March 8, 2021): The June 13, 2009 revival of...

A Concert and a Premiere Broadcast by Bass-Baritone Timothy Jones, Pianist Howard Watkins, and ROCO Margaret Bonds (1913-72) is...

MARGARET BONDS (1913-72) WAS A CONCERT PIANIST as well as a composer. By the age of eight she had been taking piano lessons for several...

Margaret Bonds, Langston Hughes, and the Note on Commercial Theater In the chapter titled “When the Negro Was in Vogue” of his 1940...