New book on two of Margaret Bonds’s most important Civil Rights manifestos

Michael Cooper (Southwestern.edu)

Dr. Michael Cooper is authoring a book on two of Margaret Bonds’s most important Civil Rights manifestos — the “Montgomery Variations” (1964) and her setting of the W.E.B. Du Bois “Credo” (1965-67) for Cambridge University Press.

The book will be part of the inaugural batch (six volumes) of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series, edited by the estimable Nicole Grimes and Paul Harper-Scott. It’s been in the works for some time already, and the manuscript will be finished this summer. My hope is that it will combine with the editions I’ve recently published with

to help these two masterpieces (no exaggeration) achieve a real and lasting footprint in a musical world that desperately — SO desperately — needs to hear them.