Black Women Composers
Chicago Black Renaissance
The 1930s into the 1950s witnessed an amazing blossoming and expansion of artistic creativity in the Black community. I’m focusing on three specific composers that were a part of the Chicago Black Renaissance movement, and the following generation that benefited and still continue to benefit from the incredible work that took place.
Carl Van Vechten, ©Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
The Chicago Black Renaissance movement began in the 1930s into the mid 1950s, based primarily around the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. It was very much a literary-inspired movement. At the heart and soul of it was the incredible advocacy, poetry and prose of Langston Hughes. There are three fascinating Black women composers that I'd like to focus on that are connected to this movement and then what came after: Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Irene Britton Smith.
Florence Price
Florence Price, born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, had a great impact on many other musicians of the time and was a close working partner with Langston Hughes, setting a number of his poems to music. Price, as is the case with our other two featured composers I’m focusing on here, was a voracious student, not just of music, but of knowledge in general.
Photo by G. Nelidoff, courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries
Even at the age of eight years old, Florence Price was reading anything she could get her hands on. She spent many hours in her father’s extensive library going through all manner of books, including her father’s books on dentistry.
As a music educator, I’m inspired by Florence Price's work, especially in the creation of curriculum and music education curricula for two historically Black colleges. And I’m not just referring to college-specific music education here. I’m referring to kindergarten through college.
Think about that! She single-handedly created an entire music education curriculum for kindergarten through college. It boggles the mind. She was also a big part of the Roosevelt Administration Works Progress Administration (WPA), specifically the Federal Art Project, where she was based in Detroit and had a number of her works played and premiered by the WPA symphony in Detroit later to become the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Then back to Chicago to become a significant presence teaching composition, and also her own music-making on the Chicago scene, working closely with the Chicago Women's Orchestra, one of the premier orchestras in America at that time.
By the end of Florence Price's life, she was living in an artistic communal situation at the Lincoln House with one of her daughters on the South Side of Chicago teaching literally hundreds of students. In succeeding generations these students have gone on to do significant work in their own rights as music educators and performing musicians. Check out my in-depth study of the life and work of Florence Price here.
Margaret Bonds
Next, I'd like to focus on the work of one of Florence Price's greatest students and protégés, Margaret Bonds, born in Chicago in 1913. Margaret Bonds’ mother's house was a central gathering place on the south side of Chicago for all manner of Black visual artists, writers, poets, dramatists, and musicians The young Margaret Bond was surrounded by these influences for years and that set her on her own artistic path. She studied composition and piano with Florence Price and was one of the first Black students to attend Northwestern University.
American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher.Margaret Allison Bonds
As a sixteen-year-old student of color in 1929, Margaret Bond was not allowed to live on campus, so she had to make the trek from her home up to the Northwestern campus on a regular basis. She retained a consistent thirst for knowledge. For inspiration, she carried with her a poem:
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
by Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Margaret Bonds was clearly a fan of Langston Hughes’ incredible poetry poetry, and set a number of his poems to music. She was the first Black soloist to perform with the Chicago Symphony in 1933, performing Florence Price's Piano Concerto.
Bonds moved to New York City after graduating from Northwestern University. There she attended the prestigious Juilliard School of Music and studied composition with Roy Harris, Robert Starer, and Emerson Harper, and piano with Djane Herz.
Irene Britton Smith
Finally, I'd like to focus on a great example of the next generation of composers. Irene Britton Smith, born in Chicago in 1907, was a Chicago-based pianist, violinist, and composer. She published thirty-six works, nineteen of which are for voice. She had a very interesting heritage, both Black and Native American, specifically Crow and Cherokee Indian. She was interested in infusing some of her own musical compositions with Native American elements, in addition to other indigenous types of sounds.
Irene Britton Smith
Irene Britton Smith was a highly educated teacher, composer and musician, attending the Chicago Normal School in 1926 for an education degree, then the American Conservatory of Music in 1943 where she studied with composer Leo Sowerby. Then to the Juilliard School of Music right after the Second World War, and then to the Berkshire Festival, Tanglewood, in Massachusetts in 1949. The time that she spent at the Berkshire Festival influenced her composition work a great deal. Then to DePaul University in Chicago in 1956. She made the trek to France to Fontainebleau to work with Nadia Boulanger, another one of the Americans making the pilgrimage to Fontainebleau in 1958.
So, an incredible journey just of her own education and expansion. Irene Britton Smith was always very interested in finding and contributing to what she and other composers of the time were calling the Chicago Sound. I believe from the influence, at least in part, not only of Florence Price, but I suspect more of German composer and music theorist, Paul Hindemith, who was a fixture at the Berkshire Festival for a number of years. Smith also worked with American composer Ulysses Kay, a prominent influence for her, alongside the French neoclassical composers, which she would have gotten an earful of while working with Nadia Boulanger near Paris in the late fifties.
Irene Britton Smith taught in the Chicago public school system for forty-two years, and one of the innovations that she introduced to her own music education curriculum was the incorporation of percussion ensembles. She had other teachers coming from all over the U.S. to view what she was doing in terms of the ways that she was pioneering pitched and non-pitched percussion ensembles into her own music education curriculum.
Performances
I hope you've enjoyed my review of these three wonderful, important women composers who had so much of a legacy, both in terms of their own composition work, but even more so by their innovative work in music education.
The following video includes performances of the music of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Irene Britton Smith to provide beautiful context.
This video focuses on the lives and work of three prominent composers from the Chicago Black Renaissance movement of the 1930s through 1950s: Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Irene Britton Smith.
Poems
Travel’s End is a song by Florence Price setting a poem by Mary Folwell Hoisington.
Travel’s End
by Mary Folwell Hoisington
Oh, bed in my mother’s house,
With sheets as white as May,
With blankets wove of carded-wool,
And scented with new morn hay.
With the poke of a feather down,
From her snow-white plumey geese,
Oh, bed of mine in my mother’s house,
With sleep that was dreaming peace.
Oh, far how I walked forlorn!
Oh, bed that my mother made!
I would that your sheet might be my shroud,
And I in earth be laid.
We Have Tomorrow is a song by Florence Price which sets the poetry of Langston Hughes.
Youth
by Langston Hughes
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.
And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.