Black Women Composers - A Century of Piano Music (1893-1990)

Amanda Aldridge ... [and others] ; Helen Walker-Hill, editor
Publication: Bryn Mawr, PA, Hildegard Pub. Co., 1992

1 score (83 pages of music))
Note: Includes biographical information on composers.

Margaret Bonds Signature Series
We launched our “Margaret Bonds Signature Series” in 2021. There are more than a dozen titles including works for orchestra, piano, chorus, solo voice, and a study score for Bonds’ orchestral work – “Montgomery Variations”.

Publications in this series currently include:

Rippling spring waltz : 1893 / Estelle D. Ricketts

Cuba libre : 1897 / Anna Gardner Goodwin

Mother's sacrifice : 1908 / L. Viola Kinney

Prayer before battle : from Four Moorish pictures (1927) / Amanda Aldridge (Montague Ring)

Fantasie negre : 1929 / Florence B. Price

Nitelife : 1930 / Mary Lou Williams

Prelude for piano (1946, rev. 1962) / Julia Perry

Before I'd be a slave : 1953 / Undine Smith Moore

Spring intermezzo : from Four seasonal sketches (1955) / Betty Jackson King

Fortune favored the bold player : from White Nile suite (1964) / Philippa Duke Schuyler

Preludes no. 1 and 2 (ca. 1966) / Tania León

Troubled water : 1967 / Margaret Bonds

A summer day : ca. 1970 / Lena Johnson McLin

Billie's song ; A taste of bass ; Blues for the Duke : from Portraits in Jazz (1976) / Valerie Capers

Etude no. 2 from 2 piano etudes (1978-79) / Regina A. Harris Baiocchi

A little whimsy : 1982 / Dorothy Rudd Moore

Allegro moderato : from A summer afternoon in South Carolina (1983) / Joyce Solomon

Prankster : 1986 / Mable Bailey

Homage : 1990 / Zenobia Powell Perry
...

Margaret Bonds (1913 – 1972)

Margaret Allison Bonds (1913-72) stands as one of the more remarkable composers in twentieth-century music. Her mother was a musician who studied at Chicago Musical College; her father, a doctor who also authored one of the first published books for Black children and the lexicon Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (Jackson, Tennessee, 1893).

She grew up in a home that, while on the segregated Black south side of Chicago, was relatively affluent and a cultural mecca for musicians and other artists of color. By the age of eight she had been taking piano lessons for several years and written her first composition, and by the time she entered Northwestern University in 1929 she had studied piano and perhaps composition with Theodore Taylor of the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and Will Marion Cook, as well as (reportedly) Florence Price.

In 1933 and 1934, respectively, she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano from Northwestern University, where she had to study in the basement of the library because of her race. By 1967 her renown was so great that Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley proclaimed January 31 of that year as the city’s official Margaret Bonds Day.

Having traveled between New York City and Los Angeles for many years for her career, she decided to relocate to Los Angeles after the death of her longtime friend and collaborator Langston Hughes in 1967. She remained based there, composing, collaborating, and concertizing, until her death in 1972.Our Margaret Bonds Signature Series was launched in 2021.

Hildegard Publishing is honored to be able to offer a varied collection of Bonds’ previously unpublished music for today’s musicians to enjoy, learn and perform.

To see all of the individual publications in the series, go to our Margaret Bonds composer page.
Link: https://www.hildegard.com/resources/black-women-composers/