Margaret Bonds’ “Troubled Water”
This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum. https://youtu.be/xMJhaGhYrYc Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) was one of the first Black composers to be recognized in the United States. She studied at Northwestern and Juilliard, and frequently collaborated with the poet Langston Hughes. In 1933, she was the first Black soloist to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra. In an interview in 1971, Bonds talked about her time at Northwestern, where she was allowed to study but not allowed to live or use any facilities: “I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place–I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ an...