BRIGHT STAR: A CHRISTMAS SONG, BY MARGARET BONDS AND JANICE LOVOOS
Late in 1968, Margaret Bonds published her setting of Janice Lovoos’s Christmas poem Bright Star (Beverly Hills: Solo Music). The two had collaborated earlier that year on several compositions that, thanks to the heirs of Margaret Bonds, will soon receive their world-premiere edition at Hildegard Publishing.[1] But Bright Star, newly released in an arrangement for piano solo by Bonds champion Lara Downes (Spotify) (YouTube),is a particularly poignant articulation of the main title of an article/interview about Bonds that had been published in The Washington Post in 1964: “She has a musical mission.”[2]
The lyric for Lovoos’s Bright Star:
The context for that lyric is important. The year 1968 was the height of the brutal violence of the United States’ undeclared war in Vietnam, an unjustified conflict that cost over a million Vietnamese lives and almost as many lives on the part of their U.S. invaders. It was the year in which a senseless act of White rage tore from the world the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. It was the year of the Prague Spring and its violent suppression; the year of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, of abhorrent police brutality at the Democratic National Convention; the year of the election, after a campaign characterized by xenophobia, hatred, and racism, of Richard Nixon; the year of student protests violently suppressed worldwide, and more.
1968 was a year of cobalt night. It was a year in which those who sought hope, sought kindness, sought love found little other than violent assaults on peace and good will.
But it was also the year in which Lovoos and Bonds wrote and published Bright Star. The lyric draws on the story of the three kings’ journey to see the Christ child whose arrival was expected to bring peace to the world, but it does not recount that story. It is in fact not a story at all. Instead, it is a prayer – a prayer to the star whose light of legend guided and directed the kings’ journey to the New Testament’s Prince of Peace: “won’t you light the way for me as you did for them?” “won’t you shine as bright today, bright as when the Christ child lay in his manger in the hay?”
That was a poem whose prayer for guidance, light, and peace in the dark night of a year of upheaval certainly spoke to anyone alive and aware of the events of that year – a prayer based on the New Testament’s story, but also for Lovoos’s and Bonds’s own time.
And for our own.
Bonds’s music taps into that spirit with an immediacy of expression that is surprisingly intimate for a choral work. Each sentence of the poem is articulated by a cadence, making sure that each prayer is clearly understood; the textures are mostly homophonic, except for a brief imitative passage in line 3, when the voices ask the holy star to “light the way for [them]” – a musical depiction of the star leading the other voices as they enter in turn.
Most significantly, while lines 1 and 2 begin in the major mode but cadence in the minor mode – an affective journey from brightness to dark – the tonal journey changes after the speaker has asked the star to “light the way for me.” Now, with that petition for divine guidance, lines 6 and 9 cadence in the major mode – with a raised third that perhaps symbolizes the light, the peace, the joy that were the sought-after, and apparently attained, goal of the speaker’s journey. This is music that is unassuming, unpretentious, humble even – but rich, timely, hopeful, and deeply personal. Bonds’s “mission” in this piece, I believe, was to musically envoice the hope and the prayer for peace that her world so desperately needed.
I happened upon “Bright Star” in 2019 in the context of my collaboration with Lara Downes. I hadn’t considered the piece closely before, but doing so now I see how Bonds’s collaboration with Lovoos produced a gem in miniature, a work of tender musical beauty and a poignant timeliness that addressed itself not only to all people of good will in that tumultuous year of 1968, but also to their kindred spirits today. May Bonds’s and Lovoos’s voices, and others marginalized in the commercialized clamor of the holidays in our own time, speak to us and move us today – giving us, like Bonds’s own listeners and performers, a celebration of light, of hope, of kindness, of peace.
Postscript: As I write, composer/pianist/vocal coach Jacqueline Hairston has prepared a new arrangement of Bright Star for solo voice and piano. A virtual performance of that arrangement is forthcoming. I’ll share it here when it’s out.
[1] Margaret Bonds: Three Sacred Songs, ed. John Michael Cooper ([Worcester, Massachussetts]: Hildegard Publishing Company, [forthcoming]). [2] Christina Demaitre, “She Has a Musical Mission: Developing Racial Harmony; Heritage Motivates Composing Career,” The Washington Post 87, no. 253 (14 August 1964).
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