Biography (read more)
Margaret Bonds was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and educator of the 20th century, born in Chicago and active there before relocating to New York City in 1939, where she remained based until 1967, and finally to Los Angeles, where she served as music director at the Inner City Cultural Center. Her output spans art songs, arrangements of African-American spirituals, chamber and orchestral works, ballets, and music-theater pieces, including frequent collaborations with poet Langston Hughes; her Montgomery Variations (1964) was dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. She died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in April 1972 at age 59, following a period of depression that followed Hughes’s death.
Bonds broke significant racial barriers in American classical music, becoming the first Black performer to appear as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 and one of the earliest Black women elected to ASCAP membership, while dedicating much of her career to promoting the work of fellow African-American composers. Her spiritual arrangements and civil-rights-themed compositions have seen renewed scholarly and performance interest in recent decades, though her legacy has been complicated by copyright issues stemming from her death before the 1976 Copyright Act.
Sources: