A TETRALOGY OF GOOD NEWS, COURTESY OF FLORENCE PRICE, MARGARET BONDS, AND FRIENDS (4): Margaret Bonds’s “Troubled Water” as Played by Her Star Student

During Margaret Bonds's woefully under-studied late California years she was the piano teacher of a young man named Gare (Gary) Osby, whom she came to know through her close friend Dr. Albert McNeil (1920-2022). Oz, as he is now known, was playing piano for one of Dr. McNeil's choirs. He became a regular part of Margaret Bonds's life during those late California years -- not only studying piano with her, but also (because she never learned to drive and did not own a car) driving her around as needed. He was, in fact, the last person to see her alive, dropping her off at her apartment after a gathering with the principals of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which was planning to give the SoCal premiere of her Credo later that spring.

Bonds enthused about Oz in her letters and her 1971 interview with historian James Hatch, saying that he was "really something" and was "going places."

Oz was in his late teens when he met Margaret Bonds in 1969, and her teaching was foundational to his piano technique. More importantly for purposes of this post, it was under Bonds’s own tutelage that he learned one of her best-known compositions: "Troubled Water," based on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” And now, more than half-a-century later, he has finally recorded it and posted his recording to YouTube.

The release of that recording is what prompts this fourth installment in this series of glad tidings brought to a hurting world by Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, and friends. I’ll talk a bit more about the recording in a moment, but in order to appreciate its status as a milestone in Margaret Bonds’s posthumous reception we need to know the story of “Troubled Water” itself. Nobody tells that better than Margaret Bonds herself. Here are the essentials, as given in a beautiful inscribed autograph that she gifted to Cheryl Wall):

Columbia College, Chicago, Cheryl A. Wall collection of Margaret Bonds and Florence Price manuscripts

With the exception of The Migration and the orchestral arrangement that was to be played at the Watergate Hotel (both of which remain elusive), that beautifully told story can be illustrated in a number of little-known surviving autographs and other documents. I’ll do that in another post. For now, let me just flesh it out with a few elements:

• Bonds herself gave the first documented performances of the complete three-movement Spiritual Suite in Bermuda in two concerts with her close friend Charlotte Holloman. Those concerts were given on January 30 and February 3, 1962; here are the cover and the relevant program page from the January 30 program:

Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.), Margaret Bonds Papers GTM-130530 Box 4, folder 3

• Bonds performed the complete Spiritual Suite, including “Troubled Water,” on several other occasions. In the meantime, over the course of the 1960s she shared it also with dynamic young pianist Armenta Adams [Dumisani], eventual founder of the Gateways Music Festival, who performed it on her U.S. State Department-sponsored tours of Africa and Europe in 1965-66. The work was still in manuscript and its title still accordingly in a state of flux, so Adams appears to have given the entire Spiritual Suite under the title Troubled Waters: Suite Based on Negro Spiritual Themes. Here are the cover and relevant program page from the programs she gave in three concerts in the Republic of Malawi in 1966:

Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.), Margaret Bonds Papers GTM-130530 Box 5, folder 1

• Finally, Bonds published “Troubled Water” (independently of the other two movements of the Spiritual Suite) with Sam Fox Music in January 1967. Musicologist and pianist Helen Walker-Hill (1936-2013) published a new, heavily edited edition in her anthology Black Women Composers: A Century of Piano Music (1893-1990) (Bryn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing Company) in 1992, and the following year iconic Bonds champion Althea Waites (b. 1939) issued the world-premiere recording on her landmark album Black Diamonds (Cambria CD-1097). That recording is still the gold standard whose footprint is indelibly etched on almost every other interpretation. Other editions have appeared since – most notably, Louise Toppin’s in her world-premiere edition of the complete Spiritual Suite (Ann Arbor: Videmus, 2020) – and “Troubled Water” is now regularly performed and recorded, integral to many advanced pianists’ repertoire.

Those are the essentials of the “professional” story of “Troubled Water” – but there’s another, equally important aspect that’s omitted in that story – for from the mid-1930s to her death in 1972, Margaret Bonds was a committed and highly successful piano teacher, and she also assigned “Troubled Water” to her more advanced students. One of those students was Cheryl A. Wall (1938-2020; later a professor of English at Rutgers University and a distinguished literary scholar and critic), who was twenty-seven years old when Bonds gifted her the autograph manuscript of “Troubled Water” shown above.

We have no documentation of how Bonds taught "Troubled Water" to Cheryl Walls -- but all is not lost. Because Oz shows us that, and more.

Due to Asperger’s syndrome (named here at his wish), Oz no longer plays piano publicly, but he maintains a YouTube channel titled “Oz Plays Piano” (here), and this past week he posted his own performance of “Troubled Water” to that channel. It’s a remarkable recording, gifted us by a first-generation student of Margaret Bonds herself; and it reflects the technique and the pianistic tutelage of Bonds herself as well as perspectives yielded by Oz’s own subsequent half-century (plus) of living with, and loving, the masterpiece he learned from his last piano teacher.

There’s a great deal to say about this impassioned and beautifully nuanced performance – more than can be attended to here. For now, let me just note that Oz’s unorthodox tempo choices give his reading a duration of 7’34” rather than the approximate 5’30” familiar from most other performances and bring his interpretation into line with the duration of 8’00” that Raoul Abdul (1929-2010), a baritone, noted critic, and friend of Bonds, assigned to the arrangement for cello and piano that Bonds wrote for and performed with the great cellist Kermit Moore (1929-2013), which is the same music bar for bar as the one that Oz has recorded here. (See Raoul Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977], p. 54.) They also are generally consistent with Bonds’s own trademark challenging of orthodoxies, and with the decidedly not literalist approach Bonds herself brought to her performances of her own music, as documented in the “swung” rhythms of her interpretation of an early version of “The Valley of the Bones” (also from the Spiritual Sute; see here) and her performance of the piano part in her recording of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” with her friend Adele Addison (b. 1925). (I haven’t shared the latter yet, but will do so soon.)

Some may question certain aspects of Oz’s interpretation – voicing concerns to the effect of “that’s not what she wrote.” To these, I personally would reply only that the world of piano performances is full to overflowing with “unwritten performance traditions” (many of which purport, truthfully or not, to stem from the original composers) – and that “liberties” and “licenses” are hallmarks of the performances of acclaimed interpreters including Horowitz (whose technique and pedagogy influenced Bonds’s own), Ivo Pogorelić, Martha Argerich, and of course Glenn Gould. If those individuals are allowed to depart substantially from the music as written, indeed to base their reputations in no small part on their highly individualized license-taking, why should Oz (who, unlike those pianists, is a first-generation student of the composer) not be allowed that same liberty? The poetry of his understanding is, in my opinion at least, compelling.

Enough. This recording is a milestone and a thing of great beauty. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eon892kh_58