Or, How Margaret Bonds and Florence Price Came to Be My “Whys”
Over the years most of my friends have known me as a musicologist whose interests centered primarily on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and European music of the long nineteenth century (ca. 1780-ca. 1914). There have been ripples and waves in my stream of my books, articles, and published editions of Mendelssohn’s music (e.g., a 2015 article in the Journal of the Society for American Music on the nineteenth-century Utopian community of La Réunion in Dallas, Texas, as well as other pieces on eighteenth-century timpani performance practices, and short pieces on Richard Strauss). And my closer friends knew that I tried pretty seriously to launch an overlarge project – which I still maintain is crucial – to edit and publish the several hundred still-unpublished letters of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.
Still, before about 2016 not even my closest friends would have foreseen that I’d choose to devote what is probably the last chapter of my career to the music and lives of Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds, using my interest and experience in musical philology and archival research to produce a sizeable number of published editions of both composers’ previously unpublished music – 70 editions of music by Price, with more in the offing; and 15 editions of music by Bonds, with more in the offing – as well as two books on Bonds and a number of papers and other talks presented on both composers. For those who knew me as a Mendelssohnian and historian who until recently published primarily on European music, this more recent chapter in my scholarly life may seem to have come out of nowhere. Some may have wondered where it did come from.
Well, it did not come out of nowhere. And it has a very clear starting point: a “moment of light” that I experienced in Tallahassee, Florida, back in the late 1980s.
If you’re interested in knowing the Why of how Margaret Bonds and Florence Price have come to be my public Why, there are two new articles that asked me that very question. One is a story written by Meilee Bridges, of Women Communicators of Austin, for the Fall 2023 issue of the alumni magazine of my university (Southwestern); the other, an interview by the wonderful piano pedagogue Fanny Po Sim Head for the Hong Kong-based classical-music online journal Interlude, with an eye to my Cambridge University Press book on Margaret Bonds and her Montgomery Variations and Credo (due out this month).
Links are below. But it’s important that you understand that I am not sharing these pieces as something that’s about me. I specifically tried to keep the focus on teaching about Bonds, Price, and the vitally important task for modern musicians to reach beyond the pale of the composers and works whose familiarity was created and perpetuated by society’s privileging of Whiteness and maleness (and European-ness), and instead to reject that privileging and lift up the countless voices of musicians of color, female and male, whose marginalization was its goal and effect. The Southwestern article talks how the classical world’s addiction to an exclusionary canon, and its refusal to effectively confront its twin defining demons of racism and sexism, are fueling its own increasing irrelevance. The Interlude interview focuses on a few of the insights yielded by my long-belated scholarly study of The Montgomery Variations and Credo in their larger biographical, social, cultural, and political contexts.
So if you read this, please keep your eye on the ball: I’m the interviewee, but these pieces are about Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, and the entrenched systemic racism and sexism of classical music and music education. Price, Bonds, and the Bonds compositions focused on are case studies that illuminate how high the stakes really are; case studies that teach why it is always important for musicologists, music theorists, and other musicians specifically to listen to and work on music that the system does not teach them to know, know about, think about, teach about.
Enough: here are the links: