Margaret Bonds: The Ballad of the Brown King and Selected Songs. Laquita Mitchell (soprano), Noah Stewart (tenor), Lucia Bradford (mezzo-soprano), Ashley Jackson (harp); The Dessoff Choirs and Orchestra; Malcolm J. Merriweather (conductor and baritone). Avie Records AV2413.
By Anne E. Johnson
DIGITAL REVIEW – A fair amount of attention has been paid recently to the African-American composer Florence Price, including here in CVNA, but Price also taught composition to other women. One of her students, Chicago native Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), is the subject of a recent CD by the Dessoff Choirs and Orchestra under the direction of Malcolm J. Merriweather.
While growing up in Chicago, Bonds took piano lessons from her mother and eventually composition with Price and William Dawson, who was also black. After earning two music degrees from Northwestern University, Bonds made her way east to New York, where she became a close friend of the poet Langston Hughes. The 23-minute cantata on this CD, The Ballad of the Brown King, written in 1954, is the most significant result of their collaboration.
Merriweather, who has led the Dessoff Choirs since 2016, created a new orchestration of this work for the recording. In 1960, when the cantata premiered, it was performed in a revised, orchestrated version, the original having been for voice and piano. But Bonds’ orchestration was never published. As for Hughes’ text, it was just as significant then as it is now for its African- American perspective on the Nativity story. As harpist and Bonds scholar Ashley Jackson put it in an interview with Presto Classical, “it allows black listeners to feel part of a story that in so many depictions leaves them out.”
one was a brown man, so they sing.’ (Gordon Parks)
The perspective of The Ballad of the Brown King is introduced succinctly in the libretto’s opening line: “Of the three wise men who came to the king, one was a brown man, so they sing.” In the work’s nine movements, totaling about 24 minutes, Bonds intertwines stylistic elements of European Romantic orchestral writing, jazz harmonies, the energy and phrasing of American spirituals, Calypso syncopation, Christian hymn-singing, and even Arabian-inspired ornamentation. All of these musical facets might be seen to represent the cumulative experience of black people through history.
In the opening movement, “Of the Three Wise Men,” tenor Noah Stewart introduces each line of text, which is then spun out by the chorus. Bonds’ complex vocal part-writing has been validly compared to that of Barber and Menotti, but David Wilcox also comes to mind. While the original for piano accompaniment probably sounds quite different, the assigning to violins of running obbligato lines – particularly in “They Brought Fine Gifts” and “Oh, Sing of the King Who Was Tall and Brown” – results in a striking sense of constant motion.
There are three solo voices in this score, sung by Stewart, mezzo-soprano Lucia Bradford (who has only one solo turn, in the final movement), and soprano Laquita Mitchell. Mitchell has a rich voice despite alarmingly wide vibrato at times.
The Dessoff Choirs get to demonstrate what they can do both as a combined ensemble and as smaller groups. The men did an especially fine job with the sweeping waltz rhythm of “Now, When Jesus Was Born.” The chorus-and-organ movements should by rights become standards at holiday concerts for choirs everywhere: Conductors, order your scores for “That Was a Christmas Long Ago” now, so you’re prepared by December.
Merriweather’s orchestration calls for a small group of strings plus harp and organ. Recorded in the James Memorial Chapel in New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, the sound production has a bright, sweet tone perfect for Bonds’ flowing accompaniment style; it’s reminiscent of Hollywood movie scores of the early 1950s.
The second half of the CD is dedicated to short art songs by Bonds. They are sung with earnestness and great expression by Merriweather, whose baritone easily stretches to tenor range. Jackson provides elegant accompaniment on the harp.
“To a Brown Girl Dead” (1956) sets a simple but devastating text by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903-1946), in which a mother sells her wedding ring so she can afford to give her daughter a funeral she would have been proud of. Bonds uses a Hughes poem for “Winter Moon,” haunting for its repeated neighbor-tone patterns as the pick-up to each phrase.
The final tracks are a collection of Hughes texts, Three Dream Portraits, composed in 1959. These songs encapsulate some essential elements of the African-American experience. “Minstrel Man” is the most moving, its sustained notes beautifully controlled by Merriweather as he sings of the way a man’s happy face and stylish clothes can mask profound, lifelong pain.
The Dessoff Choirs and Orchestra are a New York-based organization dating back to 1924 dedicated to finding and disseminating little-known choral music. It’s a laudable goal that raises some questions: Why are Bonds’ works not better known, and what other treasures would we uncover if we bothered to look?
Bonds is just one example of the rich culture of African-American classical music in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where women in particular seem to have felt empowered to create to a degree not typical of the rest of America at that time. (See Helen Walker-Hill’s fascinating article in Black Music Research Journal for more on this phenomenon.) Whatever the reason for that particular blossoming of black women’s talent, one can only hope recordings like this one inspire further exploration of it by today’s artists.
Anne E. Johnson is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her arts journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Classical Voice North America, Chicago On the Aisle, and Copper: The Journal of Music and Audio. For many years she taught music history and theory in the Extension Division of Mannes School of Music.
