World Premiere: April 18, 1918
Last HSO performance: March 13, 2016
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
Duration: 15’

The remarkable Margaret Bonds, born in Chicago in 1913, was the daughter of physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds. (When she was divorced four years later, Estelle reclaimed her maiden name, and Margaret kept it for the rest of her life.) Margaret was immersed in music from an early age not just by her mother but also by the household’s many artistic visitors, including Florence Price, whose Symphony in E minor became the first orchestral work by an African-American woman to be performed by a major American orchestra when Frederick Stock led its premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June 1933. Bonds studied composition with Price and with William Dawson while still in high school, and subsequently won a scholarship to Northwestern University, where she earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees by age 21. She won the Wanamaker Foundation Prize for her song Sea Ghost while still an undergraduate, and became the first African-American soloist to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she performed John Alden Carpenter’s jazzy Concertino on the same program as the premiere of Price’s Symphony in 1933. (Carpenter’s guest for that special concert, titled “Negro in Music,” which also included works by John Powell and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, was George Gershwin, who was then negotiating the rights to base an opera on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy.) 

Bonds concertized and founded the Allied Arts Academy for music and ballet in Chicago before moving in 1939 to New York, where she studied piano and composition at Juilliard (and privately with Roy Harris), served as music director for the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem and for several theaters, worked as a music editor, organized a chamber society to foster the work of Black musicians and composers, and performed. She also composed prolifically — works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, piano and theater, as well as art and popular songs and arrangements of spirituals (some of which were commissioned and recorded by Leontyne Price) — in a style that enriched the classical genres with the influences of jazz, blues, spirituals and her own social awareness. (Montgomery Variations for orchestra, dedicated Martin Luther King, Jr., was written in the wake of the 1963 firebombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church, a target of white nationalists because it was a center of Black organizing for equal rights.) In 1967, Bonds moved to Los Angeles to work at the Inner City Institute and Cultural Center. A month after she died unexpectedly, on April 26, 1972, Zubin Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in her last major composition, Credo for soloists, chorus and orchestra set to a text by W.E.B. DuBois, whose movements are titled: I believe in God … in the Negro race … in pride of race … in the devil and his angels … in the prince of peace … in liberty … in patience. Margaret Bonds’ work was recognized with awards from the National Association of Negro Musicians, National Council of Negro Women, Northwestern University Alumni Association and American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations, considered by many to be her masterpiece, was composed in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham firebombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, in which four young girls at Sunday School were killed and dozens of parishioners injured. In the preface to the first publication of the score of the Montgomery Variations, in 2020, editor John Michael Cooper, Professor of Music at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, wrote that the work’s vision went far beyond that one horrific event to encompass “the Montgomery bus boycott and other racial rights actions against Jim Crow segregation, as well as the backlash against them.” Bonds dedicated the score to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered a forceful eulogy five days after the bombing that called it “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” There was a performance of the Variations in 1967, probably in Los Angeles, conducted by Albert McNeil, though details have not been discovered; it would have been the only time Bonds heard her piece. The “official” premiere was given by the University of Connecticut Symphony Orchestra on December 6, 2018, conducted by Paul McShee.

Bonds wrote, “The Montgomery Variations is a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme I Want Jesus to Walk with Me. The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitas — a bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme in the same key — major and minor.

“The words are as follows:

I want Jesus to walk with me.

All along my pilgrim journey,

Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my trials, Lord, walk with me.

When my heart is almost breaking,

Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.

When my head is bowed in sorrow,

Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

“Because of the personal meanings of the Negro spiritual themes, over-development of the melodies is avoided.

“Decision. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.

“March. The Spirit of the Nazarene marching with them, the Negroes of Montgomery walked to their work rather than be segregated on the buses. The entire world, symbolically with them, marches.

“Benediction. A benign God, Father and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children — the good and the bad alike.”