Four Centuries of Great Music February 11, 2024 Music by Black Composers

Two weeks ago on Evening Eclectic which is on Sunday nights from 8-10pm I was talking with Aaron Dworkin, founder of the Sphinx organization.  The Sphinx organization promotes the development of “classical music” musicians and composers of color to increase the diversity of classical music creation and performance. And in our discussion we concluded that there should not be a Black History month or Women’s History Month or Hispanic heritage month because we should be celebrating African American’s contributions, women’s contributions and Hispanic contributions to American history and culture every month of the year.  

And with my programs on WRUU, I try to adhere to that philosophy of featuring composers and performers of color, of all genders and of all sexual orientations throughout the year.  Now the fact that this past Tuesday’s Contemporary Classics featured the music of a black woman composer Florence Price and tonight’s Evening Eclectic is featuring an album entitled Black is Beautiful is just a coincidence of scheduling and not reflecting that February is Black History Month.

However, I will follow any lead that helps me promote diversity in my programming.  So this month I will be featuring black composers and performers on Four Centuries of Great Music throughout the month.  And yes next month  I will feature women composers and performers here on Four Centuries of Great Music.  Again, I will take any excuse to promote diversity in classical music.

Let’s begin today with a black woman composer, Margaret Bonds and her orchestral composition “Montgomery Variations”.  Margaret Bonds was born and grew up in Chicago, studied at Northwestern University prior to moving to New York to continue her studies at Juilliard.  She flourished in Harlem in the 1940s and  1950s and was probably most famous for her art songs written to the poetry of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Montgomery Variations is Bonds’ sole purely orchestral work to survive. It is representative of her style in several ways. Like her peer Harlem and Chicago Renaissance composers, Bonds draws upon the spirituals and jazz for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic resources. This she couples with Western classical techniques such as counterpoint and traditional forms and genres. Also, the work engages with African American history.

As Bonds was born during the Jim Crow era and participated in the struggles against racism, this and many of her other works are programmatic and revolve around important moments in the African American civil rights struggle post-World War Two.

The genesis of the work lies in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Street Church bombing that killed four young girls in Birmingham, Alabama.

As her response to the bombing, Bonds loosely chronicles the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Birmingham church bombing. She treats the themes of strength, resolve, resistance, determination, and faith through variations of ‘I Want Jesus to Walk with Me’.

After the first time we hear the spiritual, Bonds subsequently varies the orchestration, rhythm, harmony, dynamics, and mood, among other elements in each movement to reflect the mood and   historical moment.

’Decision’ opens the work with timpani rolls. We first hear the spiritual played by the brass, in a resolute manner. The second statement, with slight dissonance and counterpoint, is heard first in the cellos, then the brass. This movement climaxes with the restatement of the theme by the trumpets, accompanied by the full orchestra.

‘Prayer Meeting’ begins with tambourine and mournful oboe and bassoon.  After the opening, the tempo quickens and we hear syncopated rhythms as though we are now at a religious service. The mood shifts as the rhythms become straightforward and the key changes to minor. With yet another mood shift, the low
strings play a drone as the spiritual is played by the woodwinds and trombones.  The movement ends with resolve.

‘March’, like the first movement, opens with two measures of rhy-thmic pulsing, this time in the low strings. The bassoon plays an embellished version of the spiritual, followed by the cellos and upper strings. Tension and anticipation build. The trombones and then full brass, accompanied by the timpani, state the spiritual forte, building to a climax. The movement closes with a coda: we hear the two bassoons and timpani, symbolizing that Jesus is indeed walking with the marchers.

‘Dawn in Dixie’ begins with a passacaglia – a repeating descending ostinato (heard here in the low strings) – supported harmonically by sustained horns. Above, the woodwinds play lyrical melodies, slowly building to a dense, harmonically rich texture. The theme is least recognizable here, as Bonds changes to a triple meter and presents only fragments of the theme. She uses the spiritual’s first melodic phrase, ‘I Want Jesus’, as her subject, creating rich melodic and emotionally evocative variations. Absent the dissonance and march-like tempos heard previously, this expressive and lyrical movement symbolizes a New South where there is social harmony.

The ‘One Sunday in the South’ movement is set in D minor, reflecting both the major-minor modality of the spirituals (which often use minor pentatonic melody) and the nature of the work’s historical theme. The movement begins in major. Initially it seems as though it references Sunday mornings at church, filled with Sunday school and the main service. Light, lyrical, and playful, after an expansive pastoral, dancelike, passage, a solo trumpet states the theme. Bonds returns to the lyrical passage. Woodblocks, bass drum, and cymbals interrupt – referencing
the 1963 Birmingham church bombing in which four young girls were murdered while getting ready for church.

The bombing marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. The families of the girls, the injured children, and the church mourned, as did the entire nation. The world was shocked that racist hatred was so vicious as to murder innocent children. In this movement, ‘Lament’, Jesus of the spiritual who gives strength
to those who march in resistance to segregation is now Jesus who give comfort to those who mourn. We first hear the spiritual in the upper strings, accompanied by the cellos, and bass. The upper strings play the second statement of the spiritual unadorned. We then hear the spiritual in the cellos, accompanied by a decidedly minor countermelody played by the woodwinds.

‘Benediction’ is the traditional request for a divine blessing that concludes the Christian church service. The movement begins with the Benediction theme – also derived from the spiritual as was the ‘Dixie’ theme – played here in unison before we hear an allusion to call and response between the oboe and the strings and other woodwinds. At the movement’s close we hear the full orchestra playing the spiritual in a slow tempo, expressing resolve, determination, and faith.

Bonds never lived to hear her orchestra masterpiece Montgomery
Variations performed. Once considered lost, it was re-discovered in 2017.


Margaret Bonds: Montgomery Variations  -
1 — Decision 1:41
2 — Prayer Meeting 4:45
3 — March 3:19
4 — Dawn in Dixie 2:41
5 — One Sunday in the South 2:45
6 — Lament 2:40
7 — Benediction 5:20

Here is a performance of Margaret Bonds: Montgomery Variations by KELLEN GRAY conductor ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA from the album African American Voices II    Linn Records


Next in this tribute to black composers is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Othello Suite, Op.79

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer and conductor, but he had great influence in the United States. He achieved such success that he was referred to by white musicians in New York City as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s.   Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition, which he considered Johannes Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák with Bohemian music.

Coleridge-Taylor was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the first part completed when he was 23 in 1898.   In 1904, on his first tour to the United States, Coleridge-Taylor was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare event in those days for a man of African descent.   His music was widely performed and he had great support among African Americans. Having met the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Taylor set some of his poems to music.


Othello Suite, Op.79, first published in 1909 and performed in 1911, is a high drama, five-movement work. The suite is operatic and grand in style, with marches both funeral and military, along with lyrical intimate moments. Originally written for a theatre orchestra with reduced strings, the fourth movement is an excellent demonstration of the composer’s resourceful orchestration. In the willow tree, a symbol of a woman left by her lover, is the physical embodiment of grief and care for the character Desdemona. The Willow Song has a sweet melody which is passed from the trumpet to the strings.

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR 1875–1912
“Othello” Orchestral Suite Op.79
1 I. Dance 2.29
2 II. Children’s Intermezzo 3.52
3 III. Funeral March 3.52
4 IV. The Willow Song 2.41
5 V. Military March 2.12

Here is a performance of SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR’s “Othello” Orchestral Suite Op.79  by the CHINEKE! ORCHESTRA conducted by FAWZI HAIMOR
CHINEKE! ORCHESTRA    COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
Decca Records

We will close this first of hour  of today’s Four Centuries of Great Music dedicate to the music of black composers with the first two movements of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations"

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born in 1932 in New York City and was named for the celebrated Afro-British composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by his mother who was a piano teacher, organist and theater company director. Perkinson studies at New York’s prestigious High School of Music and Art, where he won the LaGuardia Prize in music upon graduation. He began his studies at New York University and gradated from Manhattan School of Music with his master’s degree in composition.

The inspiration for his Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations", though non-programmatic, is somewhat autobiographical in that it represents his attempts at what were and are his relationships to members of his family — past and present.

I. Misterioso and Allegro (to his daughter) is based on two motifs: the B-A-C-H idea (in German these letters represent the pitches B-flat, A-natural, C-natural, and B-natural), and the American folk tune “Mockingbird”

II. Alla sarabande is dedicated to the matriarchs of his immediate family, each of whom contributed a unique form of guidance for his life’s journey.

III. Alla Burletta (to his grandson). Is a composition in a playful and jesting mood. Thematically, this movement is based on the pop tune “Li’l Brown Jug.”

IV. Allegro vivace. This movement is a loosely constructed rondo which thematically begins with a fughetta (original melody), has a second theme (African in origin), and a third theme (“Mockingbird” paraphrased).


Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations": I. Misterioso: Allegro
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations": II. Alla Sarabande
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations": III. Alla Burletta
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2, "Generations": IV. Allegro Vivace


Paul Freeman & Chicago Sinfonietta
African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 3
Cedile Records

Let’s open this second hour of Today’s Four Centuries of Great Music dedicated to the music of black composers with the final two movements of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2 again performed by Paul Freeman & Chicago Sinfonietta from the album  African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 3


We are closing today’s Four Centuries tribute to black composers  with Carlos Simon’s “Requiem for the Enslaved”.  Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Atlanta, Simon is the son of a preacher and grew up in a household where he was forbidden to listen to anything other than gospel music.  He played the piano in his father’s church and then eventually began formal piano lessons.    Gospel's improvisatory nature  along with the formal elements of the European classical music canon learned in his musical studies are critical influences in the development of his own compositional style.

He completed music degrees at Morehouse College and Georgia State University before attending the University of Michigan for doctoral studies.  Formerly on the music faculty of Spelman College and Morehouse College, in 2019 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University.  

At the time he joined the Georgetown University music faculty, it was revealed that Georgetown had enslaved blacks and sold 272 enslaved people in 1838 for the price of $115,000 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. They were purchased to work on a savage Louisiana cotton plantation.  In 2020, Georgetown University in addition to starting a reparations fund, supported Simon to write a piece of music in honor of those sold enslaved blacks.  The result of that was his “Requiem for the Enslaved”.

After visiting that Louisiana Plantation and doing historical research, Simon infused the music of the Catholic Church requiem and Negro Spirituals into this highly original composition.  Simon comingles parts of the Latin mass with references to “When the Saints Go Marching In” a hymn tune one might hear played by a second line funeral procession in New Orleans.

Carlos Simon packs the requiem with overlapping, multi-cultural meaning. Adapting the ten-movement requiem form, Requiem for the Enslaved unfolds in the following order: invocation; lord have mercy (let us go); interlude (Isaac ran away); we all found heaven; grant them rest; remember me; light everlasting; deliver me; gloria; and in paradisium (into paradise) ashe ́, shine upon them.    

Ashe ́ is a word in the Yoruba language that is used to define the spiritual life force that flows through everyone.  It is commonly used in response to prayers and hence the context here.

Simon features spoken word written and spoken by rapper Marco Pavé, drawing from the West African griot and jali legacy of storytelling. Pavé poetry is interwoven with the classical chamber ensemble, jazz trumpet, piano, and sample sounds from a church congregation.

A significant symbol Simon uses to merge sonic worlds is through the sounding of the bell. At Georgetown, the bell signals the progression of the day.  By contrast, on the plantation, small bells were attached to instruments of torture to prevent the enslaved from escaping.

Requiem for the Enslaved is an unforgettable commemoration, marking eternal rest granted to the souls of these enslaved people and finally endowing their descendants with the sounds of restorative justice sonically sermonized by Simon’s work.

Here is a performance of Carlos Simon’s “Requiem for the Enslaved” featuring the contemporary music ensemble Hub New Music along with trumpeter Jared Bailey, spoken word artist Marco Pavé and Carlos Simon on piano from the album “Requiem for the Enslaved”.      Decca Classics



Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved   I.  Invocation
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  II.  Lord have mercy (let us go)
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Kyrie
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Interlude (Isaac ran away)
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  III.  We all found heaven
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  IV.  Grant them rest
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Interlude (I got shoes)
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Spoken Word Interlude (Remember Me)
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  V.  Remember me
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Light everlasting Interlude

Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  VI.  Light everlasting
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  - Spoken Word Interlude (Deliver me)
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  VII.  Deliver me
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  VIII. Gloria
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  IX.  Shine upon them
Carlos Simon: Requiem for the Enslaved  X.  In paradisium (into paradise) ashe ́,