THE LADIES SPEAK
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What happens when you take being born into a household that is the center of the Chicago Black Renaissance and mix it with music instruction at Juilliard and under the wing of the great Florence Price, a lifelong friendship with Langston Hughes, and travels that brought you to some of the most turbulent social justice changes of the 20th century? You get Margaret Bonds, composer of numerous piano, orchestral and choral works, musicals, and the large-scale piano triumph Spiritual Suite. British concert pianist Beatrice Nicolas leads us in our latest episodes through the folk idioms and civil rights struggles that inspired the work, as well as how she was inspired to record Bonds' Troubled Water on the 2024 EP Black and Classical – a mere four years after the suite was finally published.
