[This post is about two compositions of Margaret Bonds that are gaining a new foothold on modern musical life. One is a short but surpassingly lovely choral work titled "Bright Star" (1968) – a prayer for peace that celebrates the titular “bright star” that the magi (the three kings) followed on their trek to welcome the Prince of Peace and portrays that guiding star as one that can lead us to peace in our own time. The other is The Ballad of the Brown King – a work that has never been obscure, especially in African American communities, but that is being heard more frequently than ever.]
On 23 January 1962 Margaret Bonds wrote to Langston Hughes:
“The Brown King” definitely “led the parade” this Xmas. You and I together have created a choral composition to be programmed with Bach and Handel. I am touched by the gratitude of the people who listen to it. (Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Margaret Bonds papers, JWJ MSS 26, Box 16, folder 377: no. 319).
The subject of that passage was the Bonds/Hughes collaborative masterpiece The Ballad of the Brown King, a Christmas cantata whose title derives from the eleventh-century description of one of the magi, Balthazar, by Pseudo-Bede (Manegold von Lautenbach, ca. 1030 – ca. 1103), as being “a dark, fully bearded king.” That description refutes White portrayals of the magi as White and reinstates Black folk into the central narrative of Black Christianity, recognizing a Black magus and portraying the wise Balthazar as an equal of the other wise men who celebrated the arrival of the newborn Christ the King.
As Dr. Ashley Jackson discussed in her 2014 D.M.A. dissertation, the original, seven-movement version of The Brown King was premiered at the East Side House Settlement (New York) on Sunday, 12 December 1954, by the George McClain Chorale with Margaret Bonds herself at the piano. Bonds quickly set about revising the work and eventually orchestrated it. This expanded orchestral version (now comprising nine movements) was completed in August 1960 and premiered on network television on Sunday, 11 December 1960 in a CBS television special titled Christmas U.S.A. This performance was dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Note the dates: December 11 and 12 (1960 and 1954, respectively). This weekend marks the sixty-first and sixty-seventh anniversaries of The Brown King’s entries into American public life.
Those were good weekends for Margaret Bonds and the cause of the Brown King then, and this weekend is a good weekend for Margaret Bonds and the Brown King now – for this weekend, Margaret Bonds’s Christmas music, including The Ballad of the Brown King and Bright Star, takes the North, South, East, and West of the United States.
The parade leads off in the NORTH and EAST with a historic event, as the Cecilia Chorus of New York, conducted by Dr. Mark Shapiro of The Juilliard School, gives The Ballad of the Brown King its premiere performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall (TICKETS)! Bonds spent more of her life in the City than in any other place, living and working there (when she wasn’t on tour) from 1939 to 1967. Her comment that the cantata was “a choral composition to be programmed with Bach and Handel” was right: this performance pairs The Brown King with the Cecilia Chorus’s 50-minute “pocket” version of Handel’s Messiah.
WEST wins the prize for THE MOST ORIGINAL offering – namely. Los Angeles! In that city, Bonds’s temporary home for eight weeks in 1942-43 and permanent home from 1967 to her death in 1972, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon, will give the first documented public performance of her Bright Star in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, December 11 (TICKETS). The sobriquet “most original” deserves a slight qualifier because this same program was performed on December 4, but no matter: the point is that this beautiful and rarely heard work, which Bonds described as a “Christmas gem” in a 1968 letter to her daughter, is being done in her second adopted home city. How beautiful!
And then on Sunday, 12 December (the anniversary of the original premiere) there are three (that I know of) performances of the work that entered our world on that same date in 1954:
(further) NORTH: The Brown King takes the stage in a performance by the Syracuse Opera Chorus, conducted by Christian Capocaccia, at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church in Syracuse. This performance, too, pairs The Brown King with excerpts from Messiah. The performance is at 3:00 p.m. ET; tickets are free but must be reserved in advance.
Also NORTH (and further EAST): The Cantata Singers, conducted by Anthony Trecek-King, will perform The Ballad of the Brown King in First Church, Boston/Cambridge (tickets). This program, titled “Of All the Kings,” pairs The Brown King with other Christmas-themed compositions by Schütz, Poulenc, R. Nathaniel Dett, J. S. Bach, and Jonathan Dove; it “celebrates the perspectives not traditionally considered” and features “Western European, African American, and Asian influences shine a bright and glorious light on the story of Christmas, seen by the Three Kings, in particular.” It takes place at First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (TICKETS).
And last but not least, SOUTH: The Thomasville Singers, conducted by M. Nicole Davis, will live-stream a performance of The Ballad of the Brown King from Thomasville First United Methodist Church (Thomasville, GA) as part of a concert titled Triumphant Journey. Davis does not pair The Brown King with Bach and Handel, however. Her idea is more original. Here’s how the Thomasville Times-Enterprise describes it:
Using The Ballad of the Brown King as a framework, the first half of the concert will take the audience on a journey through non-traditional selections that echo the sentiments of each movement from “The Ballad of the Brown King.”
The Brown King’s triumphant journey to Thomasville, GA, is part of Arts for the Community at Thomas University. The performance is supported in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts, which in turn is supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. This program can be viewed live on Facebook (www.facebookcom/actu31792/live).
The magi (who were actually wise or learned men, not kings) made a journey in their own day, and the Bonds/Hughes Ballad has made its own journey – from an idea to celebrate Black agency and significance in history to a musical masterpiece of unflagging originality and beauty, one that astounds and entrances audiences everywhere it goes. This weekend, on the anniversaries of the public start-points of that journey, it’s being heard from New York to L.A., from Syracuse to Thomasville. Those performances include new hearings of Bright Star to boot -- the beginning, one hopes, of that work's journey to renown.
It was a good weekend for Margaret Bonds and the world of music in 1954 and 1960, and it's a good weekend for the world of music in 2021.
