Ravinia 2023 Issue 5

arrangements to original compositions con- fronting climate change and social justice. She shares an artistic inquisitiveness with her father and frequent recital partner, gui- tarist Sérgio Assad, half of the legendary As- sad Brothers guitar duo in partnership with his brother Odair. Clarice grew up outside Rio de Janeiro and lived briefly in Paris be- fore moving to Chicago for music studies at Roosevelt University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. At the University of Mich- igan, she studied composition with Michael Daugherty, Susan Botti, and Evan Chambers while completing a master’s degree. Assad relocated to New York City after graduate school, making her mark first as a composer and arranger with the New Cen- tury Chamber Orchestra and later as a pia- nist and vocalist. In addition, she founded the contemporary quartet Off the Cliff and established a popular educational podcast series, VOXploration . Since returning to Chicago in 2016, Assad has been an integral part of the city’s contemporary music scene. Her compositions and arrangements have been commissioned, performed, and record- ed by artists worldwide. Assad has received numerous honors, including an Aaron Cop- land Award, Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Van Lier Fellowship, and McKnight Visiting Composer Award. Danças Nativas , written and recorded by the Aquarelle Gui- tar Quartet, received a Latin Grammy nom- ination for Best Contemporary Composition in 2009. Her acclaimed collaboration with Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion and Sérgio Assad— Archetypes —received three Grammy nominations in 2021 for Best Chamber Mu- sic/Small Ensemble Performance, Best Con- temporary Classical Composition, and Best Engineered Album, Classical. Assad offered the following thoughts on A World of Change for solo piano: “This piece reflects on global transformation, destruc- tion, and renewal through the metaphor of water, the element without which nothing we know could survive. From the cycles of the Clarice Assad tides to the natural bridgeways of our water- ways, we depend on the flow of the oceans and rivers to connect us. And today, we also navigate the cyber waters of our intercon- nected world, a network that questions our readiness for a world where thoughts and free speech are held tight in compressed bottles living inside imaginary clouds.” MARGARET BONDS (1913–1972) Four songs Spiritual Suite African American composer Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago, the daughter of physician and civil rights activist Monroe Alpheus Majors and piano teacher and church organist Estella C. Bonds, who di- vorced when she was 4 years old. A preco- cious pianist and composer, Margaret stud- ied piano at Coleridge-Taylor Music School with Tom Theodore Taylor and began pri- vate composition lessons with Florence Price and William Dawson at age 13. Bonds commenced her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in 1929, studying piano with Emily Boettcher Bogue and com- position with Arne Oldberg and Carl M. Beecher. Four years later, a Julius Rosenwald Scholarship supported her graduate studies at Northwestern. Bonds earned national recognition in 1932 as a recipient of the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Award for her song “Sea Ghost,” also making her New York City recital debut as a pianist at Town Hall. The following year, Bonds performed John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino with the Chicago Symphony Or- chestra at the Chicago World’s Fair (officially, “A Century of Progress International Exposi- tion”), making her the first Black soloist ever to appear with the orchestra. After complet- ing her master’s degree, Bonds performed around Chicago as a pianist, taught private music lessons (her students included Pulitzer Prize-winning pianist-composer Ned Rorem and pianist Gerald Cook), and briefly ran her Margaret Bonds own music school, the Allied Arts Academy. Bonds moved to New York City in 1939, married Lawrence Richardson the follow- ing year, and entered the Juilliard Graduate School for advanced studies in piano and composition (on a scholarship from Roy Harris) in 1941. She performed throughout the 1940s as a piano soloist and member of a piano duo with her former student Cook. Organizations across the country present- ed Bonds’s compositions with growing fre- quency during the next two decades, and her spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (1963) became universally known and sung. Northwestern University honored her with an Alumni Merit Award in 1967, and Mayor Richard Daley proclaimed Jan- uary 31, 1967, “Margaret Bonds Day” in the City of Chicago. That year, Bonds moved to Los Angeles to work with the Los Angeles Jubilee Singers and the Inner City Institute and Repertory Theater. As a composer for voice and chorus, Bonds displayed exceptional poetic tastes and a deep sensitivity to expressive text setting. “Sunset” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872– 1906) captures the long, lazy period between twilight and dark night. Born in Dayton, OH, to parents freed from enslavement, Dunbar became the first widely recognized African American writer for his realistic portrayals of Black language, life, and expe- riences, which appeared on stage and in newspapers, novels, and poems. “Children’s Sleep,” with lyrics by Vernon Glasser, began as a choral number within the children’s opera Winter Night Dreams , pub- lished in 1942. Bonds set “Sleep Song” by Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918)—a poet whose writings celebrated nature and religion and who lost his life during World War I—as a gentle lullaby for women’s chorus. The setting of “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” comes from Four Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay . Although Bonds is known to have composed six songs based on writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), these four constitute a song set as verified by a handwritten note by the com- poser. Millay and Bonds explore themes of autonomy and sensuality from the woman’s perspective. Bonds fulfilled a deep inner longing with the composition of S piritual Suite for solo piano. Having enjoyed spirituals at the end of vocal recitals by contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, and soprano Abbie Mitchell in her youth, Bonds yearned to end her own performances with spiritual arrangements for piano. “I learned some settings of Afri- can folk songs of [Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor and some of his spirituals, but they didn’t have enough of the ‘American Gospel’ feel- ing. I began to experiment for myself and set several for piano.” Bonds performed two movements of the Spiritual Suite —now known as The Bells and Troubled Water —in September 1952. Joan Holley performed the complete three-movement suite, with the first movement The Valley of the Bones , on April 12, 1942, at New York’s Town Hall. The three movements are based, in order, on the spirituals “Dry Bones,” “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells,” and “Troubled Water.” BILLIE HOLIDAY (1915–1959) Three songs The artist and legend known as Billie Holi- day was the child of heartache and pain. The daughter of 19-year-old Sarah (“Sadie”) Harris Fagan and 16-year-old Clarence Halliday (or Holiday) was born Eleanora Harris in Phila- delphia on April 7, 1915. Soon after, Clarence abandoned his child to become a jazz ban- jo player and rhythm guitarist, performing with musicians such as Benny Carter, Charlie Turner, Don Redman Big Band, and Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Sadie was evicted from the Fagan home in Sandtown-Winchester, a bustling African American neighborhood in Baltimore and moved to Philadelphia, leaving Eleanora in the care of her older half-sister. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1933) RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 27, 2023 34