![]() A few years later, after completing various professional commitments, he could finally devote his full attention to unearthing these composers’ manuscripts. By 2011, no major discoveries had appeared, so Cooper began compiling all his data on Price and Bonds. One might expect that their compositions would have emerged when diversity initiatives began in the 1990s, but nothing materialized. Price’s and Bonds’ manuscripts remained elusive for the decades that followed. “An Incredible Wealth of Musical Imagination” But a burning question remained: “What was the rest of their music like?” “I knew that the doors of music publishers-the gatekeepers for what gets performed and what gets forgotten in classical music-were closed to women and people of color,” he recalls. When his initial searches yielded little more than frustration, Cooper wasn’t necessarily surprised. Bonds, too, had also produced hundreds of pieces, but again, he could find only a handful. Price had written at least 426 compositions, yet he could only find a scant few. “Honestly, I was angry that I had been taught so much and never heard these composers’ names or any of their music anywhere,” he reveals. “I had never heard music so beautiful, so powerful, so original.”Īfter the recital ended, Cooper immediately began seeking pieces by these unfamiliar composers. Sitting in the pews of a Tallahassee church, he was introduced to Price’s “Songs to the Dark Virgin” and Bonds’ “Three Dream Portraits.” “I was stunned,” he recalls. Cooper’s passion for Price and Bonds was sparked, he shares, by “a moment of light” he experienced while pursuing his master’s at Florida State University. That fascination has led him to explore the similarly obscured work of Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, and Clara Schumann. “I’ve always been interested in the music that has been erased-the story we are not told,” he explains. ![]() Another motivation is restoring Price and Bonds to their rightful places in the pantheon of music history. That virtuosity is partly what compels Cooper. Bonds and Price on their worst days are better than most composers are on their best days.” When he first began delving into the archives, he says he “expected to find some good pieces, some great pieces, and some weaker pieces because both composers were human, and we all have our off days. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Cooper’s research has been the consistently high quality of the composers’ works. “I will keep working on both of them until I can’t,” he promises. He has also edited 150 pieces by Price, with sixty already published, and has at least 113 more to come. “ wrote nearly five hundred works, … so the only question is how many tomorrows I have left to keep bringing them out,” says Cooper. Du Bois’s “Credo.” The other, a 2024 biography with Oxford University Press, will highlight her civil rights contributions and championing of fellow Black artists and activists. One will be published in fall 2023 by Cambridge University Press and focuses on the two pinnacles of her social-justice compositions, the Montgomery Variations and her setting of W. Most had previously gone unpublished, and their performances-several at Southwestern-are often world premieres.Ĭooper is also authoring the first two books about Bonds’ life and music. He has released seventy of Price’s pieces and eighteen (of a slated fifty) editions of Bonds’ works. For the past five years, he has been diligently editing and publishing their manuscripts so that they can be more easily read and performed by today’s musicians. But those biographies never appeared, and within ten years, Bonds had also been expunged from the annals of classical music.įortunately, Professor of Music Michael Cooper is working to rectify these “systemic erasures” of Price’s and Bonds’ works. The first Black soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Bonds earned national accolades for popularizing African-American spirituals, including the oft-recited “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” When she died in 1972, three biographies of the celebrated pianist and composer were in the works, and memorial ceremonies took place in eleven major cities. Price’s collaborator Margaret Bonds enjoyed even greater renown during her lifetime. Yet as the twentieth century wore on, the twin gatekeepers of classical music and music publishing effectively silenced Price’s contributions, relegating her to obscurity. ![]() Even a decade after her passing, her legacy was such that Chicago Public Schools dedicated an elementary school in her name. A respected member of the Black Chicago Renaissance, she was the first Black woman to have a large-scale composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra-at no less grand an occasion than the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. At the time of her death in 1953, Florence Price had made her mark as a pioneer among Black concert music composers.
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