Margaret Bonds

The Montgomery Variations

Background

Composer and pianist Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago, into a family prominent in the African American community. After her father, a well-respected physician, and mother divorced, she grew up in her mother’s house, surrounded by music...and by many of the leading Black intellectual figures and musicians of the day. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a Chicago Renaissance in parallel to the well-known Harlem Renaissance, and the home of Margaret’s mother, Estelle Bonds, became a gathering-spot for prominent writers, artists, and musicians. Among the longterm houseguests was composer Florence Price, with whom Bonds later studied composition. She entered Northwestern University at age 16, and though she earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees there, she found the environment to be racist and hostile. According to Bonds, what saved her was encountering the poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes (1902-1967):

Because in that poem he tells how great the black man is. And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have—here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school—and I know that poem helped save me.

Bonds later struck up a close friendship with Hughes, and set several of his works to music, including a Christmas cantata, The Ballad of the Brown King (1960). While still at Northwestern, Bonds’s composition Sea Ghost won a national prize, and in 1933, she performed as a piano soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (the first Black soloist in the orchestra’s history). In 1939, she moved to New York City, where she would spend most of her career. Bonds studied piano and composition at the Julliard School, but was also obliged to earn a living, later recalling: “no job was too lousy; I played all sorts of gigs, wrote ensembles, played rehearsal music, and did any chief cook and bottle washer job just so I could be honest and do what I wanted.” What she wanted to do, clearly, was to make music, and over the next three decades she was successful as a composer, but also as a performer, promoter, educator, community leader, and advocate for Black music. The death of Langston Hughes in 1967 seems to have been an emotional turning-point for Bonds, and she moved to Los Angeles in 1968 to work as an educator. She died there in 1972, just a few weeks after the successful premiere of her Credo by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Montgomery, Alabama was one of the epicenters of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the defining events was the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, sparked by activist Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white rider on a segregated Montgomery bus. This marked one of the first great victories of the movement, ending in the official desegregation of Montgomery’s buses. One of the leaders of the boycott was the pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. In 1957, King (to whom Bonds would later dedicate The Montgomery Variations) and other church leaders created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which would become a major force in the nonviolent civil rights struggle.

In 1963, Bonds was on a concert tour to Montgomery and the surrounding area and was deeply inspired by King and the movement. She began work on The Montgomery Variations, one of her very few purely orchestral pieces almost immediately finishing after the dark day of September 15. She completed the orchestration in 1964. A noted scholar of African-American music, Tammy Kernodle, describes The Montgomery Variations as follows:

The thematic narrative of the work follows the chronology of 1955 to 1963, which correlates with the initiation of the Montgomery bus boycott, the rise of Dr. King, and the initiation of nonviolent direct-action campaigns throughout the South. Bonds ends the narrative framework with one of the seminal events of the Movement—the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, which killed four little girls, and its aftermath of grief. Coming only two weeks following Dr. King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the bombing signified the start of a period of overt violence that pervaded the movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

What You’ll Hear

The Montgomery Variations is in seven movements, four of which are played here. Black spirituals have been a touchstone for many African-American composers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and the primary musical theme, heard throughout, is the spiritual, I Want Jesus To Walk With Me. 

Bonds describes the action in the opening movement, I. The Decision: “Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and SCLC, Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.” After a dramatic pair of drum rolls, the spiritual theme is laid out by the brasses. The music of this brief introduction conveys a clear sense of resolve throughout. II. Prayer Meeting is much more hushed and fervent, throughout, climaxing in a subdued brass passage and a bluesy trombone solo. Describing III: March, Bonds wrote: “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.” This is quietly defiant music beginning with a solo bassoon above an insistent string rhythm, that swells inexorably at the end as ever more marchers join in. About the final movement, VII. Benediction, Bonds wrote: “A benign God, Father and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children—the good and the bad alike.” This final section starts quietly, almost wistfully, with a series of woodwind solos, eventually growing to a grand transformation of the spiritual theme, and a quiet prayerful ending.

Program notes ©2026 J. Michael Allsen