Credo - Composed by Margaret Bonds & Text by W.E.B. Debois

Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland
Performed October 13, 2024 at Rose City Park United Methodist Church
Composer, pianist, educator, and activist Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) grew up in Chicago with parents deeply committed to music and social justice. In 1939 she moved to New York where she studied composition at Juilliard while also performing and teaching. She worked at the East Side House Settlement for under-privileged young people and founded an organization to establish a canon of music by Black composers, regularly presenting concerts of their works and contributing to the canon herself. For instance, after visiting Alabama in 1963, she composed Montgomery Variations, a seven-movement symphonic tone poem based on the spiritual, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” which she dedicated to Dr. King; in her program notes, she explicitly noted the Montgomery bus boycott and the recent bombing of a Black church in Birmingham. And in 1965, she composed our featured work, Credo, which set to music the powerful and inspirational words of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Bonds dedicated the work to both Langston Hughes and to Abbie Mitchell, whom Bonds had known growing up and who originated the role of Clara in Porgy and Bess (in addition to introducing “Summertime” in the production, Mitchell was also the first to record this classic Gershwin brothers’ song).
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