Margaret Bondsaus modern

Margaret Allison Richardson Bonds (* 3 March 1913 in Chicago; † 26 April 1976 in Los Angeles) was an American composer and pianist.

Life

Bonds received her first lessons from her mother, the organist Estalla C. Bonds, and was then a piano and composition student of William Dawson and Florence Price. From 1929 she studied piano at Northwestern University with Emily Boettiche Bogue and composition with Arnie Oldburg and Dean Carl Beecher. In 1932 she was awarded the Wanamaker Prize for the song Sea Ghost.

As a pianist, Bonds made her debut at New York’s Town Hall in 1932. In 1933 she performed John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederic Stock, and in 1934 she performed Florence Price’s D Minor Piano Concerto with the Chicago Woman’s Orchestra conducted by Ebba Sundstrom for a CBS radio broadcast.

From 1936, she produced cantatas, musicals and song cycles in Chicago in collaboration with writer and lyricist Langston Hughes. She studied orchestration with Albert Nölte, toured Wisconsin and Iowa with singer Katherine Van Buren, worked for Elsie Roxborough’s theatre in Detroit and produced William Grant Still’s La guiablesse with Katherine Dunham.

In 1939 she moved to New York, where she studied at the Juilliard School of Music with Tobert Storer, Henry Levine, Roy Harris and Emerson Harper from 1941. She then worked in New York and (from 1967) in Los Angeles as a pianist (including duos with Frances Kraft Reckling, Calvin Jackson and Gerald Cook) and music teacher. In 1967 she received the Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University. Her most important student was Ned Rorem.
Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Bonds