Margaret Bonds – March and Dawn from the Montgomery Variations

Molly:

Can you hear the footsteps? Who could be marching and why?

Rules are important. They keep us safe, they keep things running. But what if a rule was wrong? Would you do something to change this?

Composer Margaret Bonds was inspired to write this piece of music by a group of people who faced unfair, prejudiced rules that needed to be changed.

In the 1950s, many states in the United States of America had segregation laws. This meant that blacks and whites were treated very differently.

It’s hard to imagine now, but back then, blacks and whites couldn’t eat together in a restaurant, sit together in a movie theater, or sit in the same part of a bus.

Blacks had to sit in the back, while whites were given better seats in the front. If the white section was full, black passengers would have to give up their seats.

This prejudicial treatment of black people led to a huge protest in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, and their actions changed laws across America.

It was this historic event that inspired Margaret Bonds to compose The Montgomery Variations.

The Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955, when a lady named Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. This act of defiance got the wheels turning – the wheels of change!

People in Montgomery began boycotting buses in protest. They took to the streets and marched, shared car rides or even taxi rides, instead of traveling by bus. In fact, so many people stopped using the buses that the bus companies almost closed down.

In December 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ordered Montgomery to allow blacks and whites to sit together on buses. This enormous change not only affected the people of Alabama, but the entire United States.

Margaret Bonds was a songwriter at the time of the bus boycott. She often wrote songs combining classical music with the African-American folk and spirituals she grew up with. The Montgomery Variations are based on a spiritual theme called “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me.”

Margaret Bonds used the melody of this song in many different ways, or variations, throughout the seven sections of the piece. Each movement tells part of the story.

Can you hear how she uses music to show people’s strength and anger? But also, hope and pride?

40,000 people boycotted buses on the first day of the protest in Montgomery.

In this movement called March, Margaret Bonds represents the boycott with the timpani and double basses playing the same notes together in unison.

It sounds like thousands of feet stamping together in the streets. The music draws us into the crowd as if we were marching with the people. It’s almost impossible to keep your feet still.

The melody is passed between the instruments of the orchestra. First bassoons, then cellos, violins and English horn. The melody gains strength each time, as does the Montgomery community. Unique voices coming together as one.

The next movement has a very different mood. It’s hopeful, like an early morning – dawn, new beginnings and the feeling of change.

Margaret Bonds was inspired by the same spiritual melodies as March, but this time she wrote very differently. Can you hear the wind instrument playing the melody? The music swells around the orchestra, like the sunrise or the chorus of birds at dawn, reflecting a community waking up to the change it helped make happen.

Margaret Bonds was inspired by the people who marched. The people who marched were inspired by Rosa Parks. And Rosa Parks was inspired by her belief in what was right and that she changed the world.