Three Early Songs by Margaret Bonds Chamber Music - Sheet Music

SKU: PR.491006810

UPC: 680160689620. 0 inches. English.

The songs in this volume document Margaret Bonds’s musical life work as composer of art songs before her move to New York in 1939. “Sleep Song” and “Sea Ghost” are the first known works by Margaret Bonds. Both were composed when Bonds was a teenager – age 14 and 19 respectively. “Sea Ghost” earned her First Prize in the John Wanamaker competition in Philadelphia. The score for “Sea Ghost” was thought to be lost until recently. “Sunset” is the only known song that Bonds set to the words of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.The edition includes extensive introductory material about the composer, the works and the edition.
About the WorksThe songs in this volume document Margaret Bonds’s musical life work as composer of art songs before her move to NewYork in 1939. The earliest of the three songs presented here, Sleep Song, resulted in a choral collaboration with FlorencePrice in the early 1930s,2 and she returned to it after her election to full membership in ASCAP in 1955 – but the programof a concert that Bonds and tenor Lemmyon Amoureux (1921-88) gave in Chicago’s Hernon Baptist Church on 13November 1936 specifically points out that the song was “composed at the age of 14 years” – i.e., in 1927 or early 1928(before 3 March).3 It is a work of delicate beauty and remarkable maturity, especially for a teenager. Drawing on the poem’s likening of the moon protectively watching over the earth at night to a loving parent reassuringly watching over a child falling asleep, it is cast as a lullaby whose gently arching melodic phrases and harmonies expand to more remote regions as the parent’s imagination reaches outward into the child’s envisioned future: “sleep on, my love, my life, be not afraid; the moon above shall guard the earth, and I my little maid. Your life, your love, your dreams are mine to keep, so sleep.” Those final words, returning to the security and intimacy of the liminal moment between wakefulness and slumber, reality and dreams, of the song’s first bars, then return to the regular, tonally settled world of the song’s opening – perhaps a musical recollection of the security and maternal love that Margaret Bonds had enjoyed from Estella Bonds as a child.One year after the composition of Sleep Song, columnist Nettie George Speedy featured Margaret Bonds in the nationaledition of the Chicago Defender in a story with a photo inset titled “Prodigy”4 – and one year after that Bonds, now sixteen, began her studies Northwestern University. In 1931, she began taking courses in art song and vocal composition with Carl Milton Beecher (1883-1968) – a strongly affirmative experience that contrasted with the harsh racism she endured elsewhere in the nominally integrated university – and either that Fall or in Spring 1932 she composed The Sea Ghost for one of Beecher’s classes. She then submitted it to the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Competition for Composers of the Negro Race. She won – beating out Florence B. Price’s song Brown Arms (To Mother), securing a much-needed prize of $250 (about $5,250 in 2024 dollars), and adding to Bonds’s national reputation. Although sometimes described as lost, the song does survive. Its first public performance was given on 15 October 2022 by soprano Nicole Jenkins and pianist Lorna Griffitt at the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Celebration of the African American Art Song Alliance, and two separate video premiere recordings were posted on 4 November 2022.The poem of Bonds’s prize-winning song was written by Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916), first published under thetitle A Sea Ghost in the monthly magazine The Century in 1892, and widely reprinted thereafter. At first blush it seems tobe a rather childish ghost story of nocturnal haunting by a sunken ship. But The Century was not a children’s magazine,and certain features suggest that the poem is not a ghost story at all.6 Rather, on close reading it emerges as a psychological parable of repressed memory and belated recognition, with the sorrowful sea serving as a metaphor for the protagonist’s troubled consciousness. Margaret Bonds set the text with evocative music whose drone harmonies and accented chords introduced by an appoggiatura on the raised fourth recall “Der Leiermann” from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. She also indulges in text-painting, using a recurrent ominous scalar surge to suggest the cresting waves of the troubled sea; eerie, chromatic harmonies in the accompaniment at the appearance of the ghost; chromatically descending lines as the ghost tells of the ship’s sinking; and a turn to the major mode as the light of dawn spreads. In the end, however, the song returns to the desolate minor mode of the opening as it becomes clear that the protagonist shares the same space, sorrow, and sea as the troubled apparition – that the sorrowing ghost, the troubled protagonist, and the turbulent sea are in many ways one with each other.The final work presented here, Sunset, is a song that has never been discussed or even mentioned in any literature onMargaret Bonds. It is also all the more significant because it is her only known setting of words by the great AfricanAmerican poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Both autographs for this song are undated – but Bonds’shandwriting in them shows that they were written later than The Sea Ghost but before she began working as a copyist inNew York in 1939. That information is significant, for it reveals that Sunset was composed after Bonds’s revelatory firstencounter with the poetry of Langston Hughes in 1931-32, and thus explains the song’s startling maturity, originality, andsheer beauty.Like many other works of Black poets of the “New Negro Movement” of the early and mid-twentieth century, Dunbar’sSunset celebrates the passing of day into darkness and the beauties of Blackness as symbolized by the nighttime sky adorned with moon and stars. Margaret Bonds’s song emphasizes that imagery by gradually darkening the harmonies as “the gold [fades] into gray,” but then introducing a new texture of rich arpeggios and new countermelodies in the upper register – an aptly sparkling musical depiction of the stars, invisible by light of day, as they twinkle “to the moon afar, across the heavens’ graying space.” By the end, day has shaken its mantle “darkly down.” And with that, the vocal line ascends to the climax of the song: a high F sharp that begins forte (the dynamic peak) and diminishes to pianissimo – all over a D-major chord with added sixth, a harmony evocative of African American vernacular idioms.