The Ballad of the Brown King: A Christmas Cantata (1954) by Margaret Bonds
Christmas Oratorio (Part V) by J.S. Bach
Magnificat by J.S. Bach
Conductor’s Note

Sixty years ago, savoring the triumph of their holiday cantata The Ballad of the Brown King, American composer Margaret Bonds wrote her lifelong friend and frequent collaborator Langston Hughes, “You and I together have created a choral composition to be programmed with Bach and Handel.” Last December, The Cecilia Chorus of New York gave the first-ever Carnegie Hall performance of Bonds’s Ballad, programmed alongside Handel. Now we bring the composer’s vision full circle, in a repeat performance of the Ballad framed by music of J.S. Bach.

Bonds was born in Chicago as World War I loomed, and died just before the Watergate break-in that led to the fall of President Richard Nixon. Her father, Monroe Majors, was a physician, editor, and author of the 1893 book Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. Her mother, Estelle Bonds, was a church musician who was her daughter’s first piano teacher. Distinguished musical visitors to Bonds’s childhood home included Florence Price and Will Marion Cook. In addition to her mother, Bonds's early teachers included Price and William Dawson; she went on to earn bachelors and masters degrees from Northwestern University, where she first encountered the poetry of Hughes. While still in Chicago, Bonds worked as an accompanist, copyist, and teacher whose students included the composer Ned Rorem. Bonds was the first Black person ever to perform as soloist with The Chicago Symphony, appearing with them twice, first in the Concertino by John Alden Carpenter, and the following year in a concerto by her former teacher Florence Price. Subsequently moving to New York, Bonds pursued studies at The Juilliard School with Roy Harris, Robert Starer and others. After settling in Harlem, she founded the Margaret Bonds Chamber Music Society, served as a church musician, and helped establish a Cultural Community Center.

Celebrating the work of composers outside the mainstream, including women and non-European composers (such as the Syrian Zaid Jabri), isn’t an anomaly for us. In the past decade, we’ve given the New York premieres of two major choral-orchestral works by Dame Ethel Smyth. And on our next concert, on April 28, 2023, we’ll give the first-ever Carnegie Hall performance of a choral-orchestral work by Mozart’s contemporary Marianna von Martines, alongside a world premiere by Derrick Skye, whose touchstones are Indian, West African, and Persian classical repertoires. How moving meanwhile to contemplate that Bonds and Smyth were, in part, contemporaries, walking this uncertain earth – Bonds in New York, Smyth in London – for three overlapping decades. Smyth died in 1944, just ten years before the 1954 premiere of Bonds’s Ballad. Both women evidenced extraordinary determination and resourcefulness, unswervingly following the star of their creative genius against the headwinds of savage prejudice. We salute them.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio comprises six cantatas, originally intended to be performed separately on different feast days. We’ve chosen its fifth cantata to open this afternoon’s concert, not only for its beauty, but also because of its close resonance with Langston Hughes’s text, as Bach’s tenor soloist and chorus evoke and reenact the visit of the three Magi. Rehearsing this work, we’ve been reminded of the centrality, to all solstice festivals, of light, both literally and metaphorically. When days are long, or times dark, our innate human yearning for light becomes that much more urgent, and poignant. Throughout this cantata, the texts invoke light as an active force, a potent dispeller of gloom and trouble.

Our societal conversations today lead us to ask what is just. The Magnificat reminds us that such questions are hardly new; one after the other, its verses point hopefully, even radically, to a transformation of society, to be brought about by exalting the downtrodden and deposing the arrogant. Bach responds to these energies with music of exceptional brilliance, power, and specificity. Just listen to how many of its gestures rise.

–Mark Shapiro 2022