A TETRALOGY OF GOOD NEWS, COURTESY OF FLORENCE PRICE, MARGARET BONDS, AND FRIENDS (2): FRANCE

Let me start by showing you the program (prepare to be dazzled!):

That program – titled “CHICAGO: Afroamericain Voices and Musics” would be cause for celebration any day, anywhere. But it’s even more remarkable because this program will be given not in the United States (home to all the composers represented in it), but in France – specifically in the beautiful Domaine de Villarceaux, a little over an hour northwest of Paris. All of the five African American women represented on this fabulous program had ties to France – some loose, some more substantive. But I doubt all five have had their music on the same program there before, and it’s a safe bet that their music has not been heard on the same program in this extraordinarily beautiful estate.

Better yet, the program is part of the festival Un Temps pour Elles, sponsored by the French organization Cité des Compositrices (City of Women Composers) – a sprawling network of concerts, music festival, video channel, and record label devoted to promoting the music of women-identifying composers – all the brainchildren of cellist and impresario Héloïse Luzzati. Together with other organizations such as the International Alliance for Women in Music, the Boulanger Initiative, the Forschungszentrum Musik und Gender, the Sophie Drinker Institut, the Archiv Frau und Musik, the Exilarte Center, the Fondazione Adkins Chiti – Donne in Musica, the Asociación Mujeres en la Música (AMM), or Patricia Kleinman’s recently launched Projecto CompositorAs, among many others, the entire nest of projects is dedicated to setting right the enduring wrong that concert programs, artist rosters, writings about music, and virtually all the other facets of musical culture continue to marginalize women, often to the point of obscurity, even though women are responsible for at least 50% of the music produced and consumed globally. The festival cannot in itself address the enduring sexism and sexual violence of the cultures of classical music, but can – and does – refute the boundaries and limitations placed upon women by traditional male-centric gender hegemonies of concert programming.

And that makes the solidarity of African American female genius represented in this concert all the more important: the genius and courage of Black women who refused to be defined by the barriers their world placed before them will be on full display in a two-hour program.

And there are two final treats:

1. As many of my readers know, this year the Fourth of July, marking the 250^th anniversary of the date on which the Continental Congress adopted the final text of the Declaration of Independence (the actual signing took place on August 2, and of course independence from Britain wasn’t achieved until the U.S. Revolutionary War ended on September 3, 1783) has been co-opted by MAGA Republicans to celebrate the “birth of a nation” in all its ugliest, vilest forms – including the celebration of “freedom” that notably and intentionally excluded Blacks and women (and still does so).  It is therefore positively delicious that Cité des Compositrices’ CHICAGO: Afroamericain Voices and Musics concert will take place on July 5, 2026 – an affirmation, in France, of African American women’s creative genius on the day following Republican America’s celebration of the exclusion of African Americans and Women from freedom in the United States itself. There’s healing power and consolation in that sequence: the poultice applied to the wound.

2. This extraordinary concert concludes with Three Negro Spirituals of Harry Burleigh Arranged for Voice and Piano Quintet by Margaret Bonds – the first known performance, ever, of Bonds’s deeply moving and ingenious arrangements of Burleigh’s settings of “Didn’t It Rain,” “Deep River,” and “Go Down, Moses.” Bonds’s arrangements, like all her other compositions in this program, have nothing to do with Chicago – she moved from Chicago to New York in 1939 and lived there until her final relocation to California in 1967, and these undated settings are found in a notebook devoted to compositions demonstrably written in New York. In that sense their connection to the main title of the program is tenuous. But the “New Negro Movement” that nourished Bonds’s genius and that of Harry T. Burleigh – a sweeping national and international phenomenon that advocated for and affirmed Black art during the deepest turbulence of the freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century – was anything but geographically particularized. And these beautiful settings attest to Bonds’s extraordinary gifts for synthesizing what she called the “Earthly poesy” of spirituals and Black vernacular styles generally with the idioms and sonorities of non-Black repertoires.

Those spiritual settings aren’t yet published, but they’ll be out later this year as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Company. And that highlights what may be the final major point to make about this concert and the series to which it belongs: the fact that its spirit is forward thinking, unconstrained by the logistical and other issues that have worked so diligently (and not without success) to “shrink” woman-identified creative genius in the worlds of classical music and beyond for thousands of years.

There are many other issues in play here – points too numerous and important to talk about in a short little blog post (for instance, one wishes there were some Black representation among the performers). But for those of us who will find it difficult (or impossible) to enjoy the United States’ celebrations on July 4 of this year, one takeaway is that once we’ve made it past the celebration of Americans’ racism and sexism (all encompassed under the rubric of “independence”) in D.C. and elsewhere in Trumplandia, we can look to France. And when we do so, thanks to Luzzatii and her collaborators, the same France that gave us the Statue of Liberty in 1884 is also shining light on liberation in 2026.

The beautiful program of Chicago: Afroamericain Voices and Musics will be performed by Marielou Jacquard, mezzo-soprano, Manon Galy and Raphaëlle Moreau, violin, Léa Hennino, viola, Héloïse Luzzati, cello, and Célia Oneto Bensaid and Théo Fouchenneret, piano. Here’s the official page for this important concert. If you are able, I hope you’ll attend!

Now check back on July 3 for the third installment of this tetralogy!