Composer, educator, choral director, and ethnomusicologist John Wesley Work III was born on June 15, 1901, in Tullahoma, Tennessee, to a family of professional musicians. His grandfather, John Wesley Work, was a church choir director in Nashville, where he wrote and arranged music for his choirs. Some of his choristers were members of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. His father, John Wesley Work Jr., was a singer, folksong collector and professor of music, Latin, and history at Fisk, and his mother, Agnes Haynes Work, was a singer who helped train the Fisk group. His uncle, Frederick Jerome Work, also collected and arranged folksongs, and his brother, Julian, became a professional musician and composer.

​

Work began his musical training at the Fisk University Laboratory School, moving on to the Fisk High School and then the university, where he received a B.A. degree in 1923. After graduation, he attended the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now the Julliard School of Music), where he studied with Gardner Lamson. He returned to Fisk and began teaching in 1927, spending summers in New York studying with Howard Talley and Samuel Gardner. In 1930 he received an M.A. degree from Columbia University with his thesis American Negro Songs and Spirituals. He was awarded two Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fellowships for the years 1931 to 1933 and, using these to take two years leave from Fisk, he obtained a B.Mus. degree from Yale University in 1933.

​

Work spent the remainder of his career at Fisk, until his retirement in 1966. He served in a variety of positions, notably as a teacher, chairman of the Fisk University Department of Music, and director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from 1947 until 1956. He published articles in professional journals and dictionaries over a span of more than thirty years. His best known articles were "Plantation Meistersingers" in The Musical Quarterly (Jan. 1940), and "Changing Patterns in Negro Folksongs" in the Journal of American Folklore (Oct. 1940).

​

Work began composing while still in high school and continued throughout his career, completing over one hundred compositions in a variety of musical forms -- for full orchestra, piano, chamber ensemble, violin and organ -- but his largest output was in choral and solo-voice music. He was awarded first prize in the 1946 competition of the Federation of American Composers for his cantata The Singers, and in 1947 he received an award from the National Association of Negro Musicians. In 1963 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Fisk University.

Following Work's collection Negro Folk Songs, the bulk of which was recorded at Fort Valley, he and two colleagues from Fisk University, Charles S. Johnson, head of the department of sociology (later, in October 1946, chosen as the university's first black president), and Lewis Jones, professor of sociology, collaborated with the Archive of American Folk Song on the Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection (AFC 1941/002). This project was a two-year joint field study conducted by the Library of Congress and Fisk University during the summers of 1941 and 1942. The goal of the partnership was to carry out an intensive field study documenting the folk culture of a specific community of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region. The rapidly urbanizing commercial area of Coahoma County, Mississippi, with its county seat in Clarksdale, became the geographical focus of the study. Some of the correspondence included in this collection between Work and Alan Lomax, then head of the Archive of American Folk Song, touches on both the Fort Valley and the emerging Fisk University recording projects.

​

Source: memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/

​

Kurt Weill (1900-1950) began his career in the early 1920’s, after a musical childhood and several years of study in Berlin. By the time his first opera, The Protagonist (Georg Kaiser), was performed in April 1926, he was an established young German composer. But he had already decided to devote himself to the musical theater, and his works with Bertolt Brecht soon made him famous all over Europe. He fled the new Nazi leadership in March 1933 and continued his indefatigable efforts, first in Paris (1933-35), then in the U.S. until his death. Certain common threads tie together his career: a concern for social justice, an aggressive pursuit of highly-regarded playwrights and lyricists as collaborators, and the ability to adapt to audience tastes no matter where he found himself. His most important works: the Violin Concerto (1925), The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, 1928), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Brecht and Hauptmann, 1930), The Pledge (Caspar Neher, 1932), The Seven Deadly Sins (Brecht, 1933), Lady in the Dark (Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941), Street Scene (Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, 1947), Lost in the Stars (Maxwell Anderson, 1949). He died of heart failure in 1950, shortly after he and Anderson began work on a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, leaving behind a large catalogue of works and a reputation that continues to grow as more of his music is performed.

​

Source: The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music (kwf.org)

​

MOSES GEORGE HOGAN, born in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 13, 1957, is a pianist, conductor and arranger of international renown. A graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, he also studied at New York’s Juilliard School of Music and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Mr. Hogan’s many accomplishments as a concert pianist included winning first place in the prestigious 28th annual Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition in New York. Hogan was recently appointed Artist In Residence at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hogan began his exploration of the choral music idiom in 1980. Hogan’s former New Orleans based Moses Hogan Chorale received international acclaim. The Moses Hogan Singers made their debut in 1998 on the EMI record label with the acclaimed soprano Barbara Hendricks. Hogan was commissioned to arrange and perform several compositions for the 1995 PBS Documentary, THE AMERICAN PROMISE, whose soundtrack was released separately by Windham Hill records under the title VOICES. Hogan’s contemporary settings of spirituals, original compositions and other works have been revered by audiences and praised by critics including Gramophone magazine. With over 70 published works, Hogan’s arrangements have become staples in the repertoires of high school, college, church, community and professional choirs worldwide. Hogan’s choral style, high musical standards and unique repertoire have consistently elicited praise from critics worldwide.

​

Source: About the Conductor Moses George Hogan/moseshogan.com/about_moses_hogan.com

​

Margaret Bonds was born on March 3rd, 1913.  From Chicago, Illinois, she was a Black pianist and composer.

Bonds’ mother, Estella, was a church organist and pianist whose home would frequent guests, including Florence B. Price and Will Marion Cook. Bonds received her Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and continued graduate studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. During her career, Bonds taught at the American Theater Wing and performed with several orchestras, including the Women’s Symphony, the New York Symphony, and the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Philharmonic.  Bonds was also the first Black guest soloist with the Chicago Symphony and the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933.

From 1968 to 1972, she worked with the inner city Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Musically, Bonds’ works for piano and orchestra are programmatic, and each depicts her sense of ethnic identity through her use of jazz harmonies, spiritual materials, and social themes. Margaret Bonds died in Los Angeles on April 26, 1972.

​

Source: Margaret Bonds, Teacher, and Composer born - African American Registry (aaregistry.org)

​