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 years, and she studied piano with Emily Boettcher Bogue (1907-92) at Northwestern University, earning her Mus. B. and Mus. M. degrees in piano in 1933 and 1934, respectively. This was followed by six years of further study with Djane Lavoie-Herz (1889-1982; herself a student of Schnabel and Scriabin and a teacher of Ruth Crawford Seeger as well as Bonds). She actually made her living primarily as a solo and collaborative pianist, and an annotated 1966 version of her curriculum vitae that survives in the archives of Northwestern University emphasizes her work as a concert pianist:
Photo courtesy of Northwestern University Archives, Emily Boettcher Bogue Papers[1]
But despite the centrality of the piano to Bonds’s self-identification as a professional, few compositions for piano solo by her are available to date. To be sure, her best-known work, Troubled Water, which began as a work for piano with voices titled Group Dance Based on the Negro Spiritual “Wade in the Water,” is widely known: Bonds published it in 1967 with Sam Fox Publishing Company (New York). The first recording was released by pianist Ruth Norman in 1978, on her album An Anthology of Piano Music by Black Composers. Hildegard Publishing Company released a new edition by Helen Walker-Hill in 1992, Althea Waites released a new recording on her landmark 1993 album Black Diamonds – the first of many performances and recordings.
Then, in February 2020, pianist and Bonds champion Lara Downes released the premiere recording of one of Troubled Water’s counterparts in the Spirituals Suite: The Bells (based on the spiritual “Peter, Go Ring dem Bells”) on her acclaimed CD Some of These Days (here’s a livestream performance from May 2020 on YouTube). And this past fall, longtime Bonds advocate Dr. Louise Toppin released the first edition of all three movements of Spirituals Suite with Videmus and Classical Vocal Reprints.
All this is wonderful, of course – but it still boils down to only two solo-piano works (plus a third that has not yet been publicly recorded) by a composer for whose musical self-identification the piano was central. Reasonable minds will wonder: surely, over a forty-year career as concert pianist, the inexhaustible musical imagination of pianist Margaret Bonds produced more than just three works for piano solo?
The answer: It did.[2]
And today Lara Downes makes another major contribution with the world-premiere recording of Bonds’s Tangamerican – a work that will be published by Hildegard Publishing later this spring. Lara has already livestreamed this still-unpublished gem, but today’s release comes as a promotional launch of Rising Sun Music – a series of state-of-the-art recordings of compositions by Black musicians ranging from Bonds, Florence Price, and William Grant Still to Daniel Roumain, Carlos Simon, and Quinn Mason.
Tangamerican is a promising launch to this important venture. Typically for Bonds, it is melodically, harmonically, and stylistically rich, but succinct – just thirty-eight measures long, about two and a half minutes in “tempo tango.” There is a fleeting reference to the cha-cha, but (as the title would suggest) the piece foregrounds the genre of the tango – an originally Argentine couples’ dance born in impoverished port areas with predominantly African diasporic inhabitants. Although the genre eventually became a ballroom dance in high society, principally through the many tangos composed by Astor Piazzolla (1921-92), its most famous exponent is probably the 1935 “Por una cabeza” (By a head), with music by Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) – a tango that has been used in countless movies (including Scent of a Woman, Schindler’s List, and True Lies). Bonds’s music drinks deeply of the sensuality and pathos associated with the genre – with evocatively intertwined duets between the soprano and tenor/baritone registers, descending chromatic lines in parallel thirds and sixths, and left-hand syncopations. Those who know the passionate intensity of Troubled Water will find in Tangamerican an entirely different sort of passionate intensity – one that offers a glimpse of a different side of Bonds’s musical personality.
Lara’s recording is available on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube.
By kind permission of the family of Margaret Bonds, the Tangamerican is currently at press in my edition with Hildegard Publishing. To learn more, see here.
[1] Emily Boettcher Bogue (1907-1992) Papers, 19/3/6. Margaret Bonds, 1971-1972, Folder 7, Box: 10, Folder: 7. Northwestern University Archives. Evanston, IL. Special thanks to Charla Burlenda-Wilson, Archivist for the Black Experience in the Northwestern University Libraries, for assistance in accessing and working with these materials.
[2] Helen Walker-Hill provides the best list in her chapter surveying Bonds’s life and works, but this list, too, is incomplete. See Helen Walker-Hill, “Margaret Bonds,” in her From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 141-88 at 173.
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