One of the first Black composers and performers to gain recognition in the United States, she is best remembered today for her popular arrangements of African-American spirituals and frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes.
Among those included Abbie Mitchell, Lillian Evanti, and composer Will Marion Cook, all of whom would become influential to her future musical studies and career.
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.
[21] On May 22, 1952, Langston (poet), Bonds (pianist), and Daniel Andrews (baritone) collaborated on a project, "An Evening of Music and Poetry in Negro Life," performing at Community Church.
Ever a good friend, Hughes sent Bonds a Western Union telegram the afternoon of her performance, telling her how much he desired to be present and sending his best wishes.
"[14] Another work based on a text by Langston Hughes was first performed in February 2018 in Washington, DC, by the Georgetown University Concert Choir under Frederick Binkholder.
In 1932, Bond's composition Sea Ghost won the prestigious national Wanamaker Foundation Prize, bringing her to the public's attention.
[7][10] On June 15, 1933, Bonds performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—the first black person in history to do so—during its Century of Progress series (Concertino for Piano and Orchestra by John Alden Carpenter).
A large work in nine movements, the piece combines elements of various black musical traditions, such as jazz, blues, calypso, and spirituals.
Bonds was writing other works during this period of her career: Three Dream Portraits for voice and piano, again setting Hughes' poetry, were published in 1959.
[21] As an outgrowth of her compositions for voice, Bonds later became active in the theater, serving as music director for numerous productions and writing two ballets.
Bonds penned a program for the work which explains that it centered on Southern Blacks' decision no longer to accept the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow South, focusing on the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
She eventually dedicated the work to Martin Luther King Jr.[5][34] In 1967, legendary choral director and vocal coach Frederick Wilkerson featured the original piano/vocal version of her setting of W.E.B.
Du Bois's civil-rights manifesto "Credo" in the first all-Bonds concert in Washington, D.C., and later that year the likewise legendary choral conductor Albert McNeil performed the choral/orchestral version of that same work, along with The Montgomery Variations, in San Francisco.
[36][5] Margaret Bonds passed away 4 years before the advent of the Copyright Act, greatly affecting her estate's intellectual property rights to her original music.
In addition, many well-known arrangements of African-American spirituals (He's Got the Whole World in His Hands) were created by Bonds, the most popular being her setting in 1962 for Florence Price.
[37] List includes works compiled in a monograph published by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago.
[47] In the 1960s, Leontyne Price, the first African American opera singer to become internationally famous, commissioned and recorded some of Bonds' arrangements of spirituals.