Document generated on 09/30/2021 11:35 p.m. Canadian University Music Review Revue de musique des universités canadiennes Deep Rivers: Selected Songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds Penelope Peters Voices of Women: Essays in Honour of Violet Archer Article abstract Voix de femmes : mélanges offerts à Violet Archer This essay examines the songs of two African-American women, Florence Price Volume 16, Number 1, 1995 (1888–1953) and Margaret Bonds (1913–72), who embarked upon their compositional studies and careers only a couple of generations after the URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1014417ar emancipation. Both discovered in the poetry of Langston Hughes (1902–67) the DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1014417ar means for reconciling the musical traditions of their African-American heritage with those of their European training. Through detailed analysis of the textual and musical symbolism in Price's Song to a Dark Virgin and Bonds's The See table of contents Negro Speaks of Rivers and Three Dream Portraits, the author demonstrates the influence of spirituals ("plantation songs"), blues, and jazz and reveals how these African-American idioms are integrated with the melodic and harmonic Publisher(s) idioms from the early twentieth-century European tradition. Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique des universités canadiennes ISSN 0710-0353 (print) 2291-2436 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Peters, P. (1995). Deep Rivers: Selected Songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, 16(1), 74–95. https://doi.org/10.7202/1014417ar All Rights Reserved © Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique This document is protected by copyright law. 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Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ DEEP RIVERS: SELECTED SONGS OF FLORENCE PRICE AND MARGARET BONDS Penelope Peters If a musical setting is able to vitalize and vivify one among the many aspects of the total form of a poem, by so doing it presents a unique interpretation of the poem's meaning.1 Implicit in Edward Cone's assertion and explicit in the continuation of his discourse is the notion that the successful musical setting must give the reader more understanding of, more insight into the poem; but how a composer achieves this, and why some poems lend themselves to musical settings are questions that engage not only authors like Cone but also most art-song enthusiasts. How does the composer, responding to the multivalent features of a poem, create a musical setting that will make it more convincing and comprehensible to either the same or a new audience? Ultimately, the music must do more than merely accompany the poem. In the successful art song, the music and the poem must be integrated to such an extent that the music becomes part of the environment of the poem. Moreover, the music of the art song, no matter how well crafted, should not be able to stand alone; it must imply the poem. The task of defining a successful art song is elusive, but in the songs of two North American women composers, Florence Price (1888-1953) and Margaret Bonds (1913-72), we find gripping, effective settings that fuse their music with the compelling images and words of the African American poet Langston Hughes (1902-67), thereby creating unified, lyric structures. The three artists, who share common ideals and heritage, were prominent and influential figures in their respective fields in the United States for much of this century. Price was born in Arkansas but began her formal musical training at the age of fourteen in Boston at the New England Conservatory of Music. After graduation she embarked on a career as a teacher and performer and also continued to study composition and orchestration with leading teach• ers, especially in Chicago.2 During the 1930s she began to gain national recognition as a composer through various awards and performances of her works.3 One of her students in Chicago was the young Margaret Bonds, with 1 Edward T. Cone, "Words into Music: A Composer's Approach to the Text," in Music: A View from Delft—Selected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 123. 2Price studied at the American Conservatory of Music and Chicago University with Carl Busch, Arthur Anderson, and Leo Sowerby. 3Some performances of Price's works include the premiere of her Symphony in E minor at the Chicago World's Fair by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1933), the performance of Symphony No. 3 16/1 (1995) 75 whose family she lived for a time. Price and Bonds had the opportunity to meet several contemporary African American artists who influenced their work, including the poet Langston Hughes and the composer Will Marion Cook. Bonds soon came into her own too, graduating with a Master of Music from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and continuing to study compo• sition at the Julliard School of Music in New York. Upon completion of her studies, she remained in New York composing orchestral works, chamber music, theatre and movie pieces, choral compositions, and art songs and touring the country as a concert pianist.4 The two composers had similar educational and career experiences, but they shared another far more connective and profound bond—their African Ameri• can heritage. Both women were fiercely proud of this heritage and looked for ways to celebrate and memorialize it in their life's work; yet, the musical traditions of their studies and of their compositions were European, not African American. They were faced with the dilemma of discovering a means of reconciling the musical traditions of their heritage with those of their training. They found a solution in the poetry of Langston Hughes, whose words and images spoke directly to the African American experience. Both the content and manner of expression in Hughes's poetry immediately engage the reader: he presents realistic pictures of present-day African Americans in gritty urban areas but elegantly expresses their attitudes and emotions in imagery that reaches every audience. Hughes may have begun "as a disciple of the New Poetry giants, Sandburg and Lindsay, writing unrhymed verse in praise of the "little people,'" but he soon developed a personal style, irresistible in its communica• tion of sorrow and laughter.5 Indeed, a powerful device in Hughes's poetry is the opposition of nonchalant humour on the surface against a background of pathos. Another striking feature is the infusion of ethnic consciousness, in• stilled in Hughes by his maternal grandmother.6 In order to envelop Hughes's poetry musically and to authenticate the combination of words and music, Price and Bonds were compelled to give equal voice to their musical heritage and to their training. Thus, in setting Hughes's poetry, they follow standard European traditions of the genre, such as the formal designs and the use of text and tone painting, but to provide under the direction of Walter Poole in Detroit (1940), and Price's performance of her Concerto in One Movement on the above program. She was also soloist in performances of her first two piano concertos in Chicago and Pittsburgh (1932 and 1934). For more bibliographical information on Price and Bonds and a complete list of their works, see Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) and Mildred Denby Green, Black Women Composers: A Genesis (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983). 4 As a pianist, Bonds performed as guest soloist with major orchestras in Canada and the United States. She received numerous awards including the Rodman Wanamaker Award for composition and the alumni medal from Northwestern University. Many of her songs exist in the repertoires of leading artists such as Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Todd Duncan. 5Donald C. Dickinson, A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes (1902-1967) (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books), 112. 6 Mrs. Langston, of Indian and French ancestry, grew up free in ante-bellum North Carolina, attended Oberlin College, and spent a productive lifetime fighting racial injustice at the side of each of her two husbands; see James A. Emanuel, Langston Hughes (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1967), 18. 76 CUMR/RMUC continuity with their African heritage, they incorporate melodic and aesthetic aspects of spirituals, the harmonic language of the blues, and the improvisatory character of jazz. Price and Bonds appropriate the vivid images and raw emotions crammed into Hughes's taut, compact verses and fashion them into a unified African American musical expression. Before turning to a selection of art songs that combine the music of Price and Bonds with the poetry of Hughes, it will be useful to examine some characteristics of the spirituals, more accurately called "plantation songs," of African Americans in Colonial America; for not only do Price and Bonds make use of of their melodic and esthetic characteristics, but many of the jazz and blues idioms of African American composer-performers derive from this same tradition.7 The plantation songs, the earliest body of music identified with African Americans, provide insight into their musical heritage and personal conflicts. Traditionally, plantation songs were largely improvised and performed by a leader and chorus in a call-and-response procedure that often resulted in the leader or soloist ending phrases with a long, sustained pitch.