Bonds - Flamenco

Piano Spheres Stein Resident Artist for 2023/24 Althea Waites performs Flamenco by Margaret Bonds from her January 16, 2024 Piano Spheres concert at the Nimoy Theater in Westwood, before a sold out audience.
Composer, virtuosa pianist, teacher, public speaker, concert organizer, intrepid champion of women and Black folk, the downtrodden, the dispossessed: Margaret Bonds stands as one of the most extraordinary figures in twentieth-century music-woman or man, Black or White. Her music would have been easily published and widely performed if she were White and male. But she was a Black woman. The music-publishing industry’s resistance to disseminating and promoting the compositions of Black folk and women meant that at her death, the vast majority of her hundreds of compositions remained in manuscript -and then were consigned to archives and libraries out of reach of most of the musical world. Although she enjoyed considerable fame in the last two decades of her life, only recently have significant new publications of those works previously given over to oblivion begun to appear.
The three works performed tonight-two of which come from a trove of thousands of pages
of manuscripts that missed the landfill by a matter of hours after they failed to sell at a book fair-combine with the better-known Spiritual Suite (including Troubled Water, which Bonds was able to publish in 1967) to offer a glimpse into the unrelenting originality for which Bonds was celebrated. The first two works both reflect her fascination with Latin American dance: Tangamerican (one of at least three tangos Bonds is known to have composed) is a short but pathos-laden contribution to the genre of the Argentine tango, with rich chromatic harmonies that pair evocatively with its sensual, sinuous melodic lines and beguiling rhythms. And while many of the same traits are present in the still unpublished Flamenco-here given its world-premiere public performance-the latter cast in an A-B-A form whose more densely voiced and animated central section is framed by simpler textures foregrounding rhythmic ostinatos and bimodal melodies flavored by Phrygian cadences.
That work may have been written for one of Bonds’ piano students-but the Fugal Dance-also presented here for the first time-was clearly written for Bonds or another pianist of her caliber. It is a one-of-a-kind composition: a polytonal fugue (that is, a fugue that eventually encompasses four different keys simultaneously) whose episodes are dominated by a running modal figure reminiscent of African American jazz. The Dance employs many learned contrapuntal techniques familiar to Bonds through the music of J. S. Bach (whom she referred to as “the father of all in Music”), but perhaps in its most striking feature is that it is a kind of musical tug-of-war between those two musical worlds that were often kept apart throughout Bonds’s life: Euro-American classical styles and Black American vernacular ones. Tellingly, though, the conflict is resolved in the forceful coda, as the harsh sonorities finally give way to fanfare-like figures in C major- giving this extraordinary work a dramatic shape that proceeds from dissonance, confusion, and strife to a sense of victory and triumph.
John Michael Cooper, Ph.D, Professor of Music, Southwestern University/Texas
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