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Especially Do I Believe: A Conductor’s Guide to Margaret Bonds’s Credo

isms, is likewise full of open fourths and fifths, an instru- the promised land, a world free of racism and discrimi-
mental commentary on the text’s false victory. nation, and brings the movement to a stirring end. The
optimism of Bond’s work here, given all the discrim-
ination and racism that constantly stunted her career
Sixth Movement throughout her life, is astonishing and inspiring.
Like the second movement, the sixth movement, “I
Believe in Liberty,” begins as an art song, with a lyri-
cal Baritone line above syncopated piano patterns. In Seventh Movement
the best Western European tradition of text-painting, The final movement (“I Believe in Patience”) shares
these patterns are clearly meant to evoke the chugging thematic material with the work’s opening, bringing
of the train mentioned in DuBois’s wish, that Black folk it to a cyclical close, yet as mentioned previously, Du-
be able to ride on segregated train cars “uncursed by Bois’s text counsels patience as we await the coming of
color.” Though outside the scope of this paper, Bonds’s a more just world. Bonds returns to the Beethovenian
output of art songs is her most stunning body of work poundings from the opening movement but excises that
in many ways. Here, her skill and sensitivity at writing movement’s opening drum roll in the piano’s left hand,
for solo voice and piano are on full display (Figure 7 on creating a sense of anxious urgency. There is a clever
the next page). movement where the first movement’s fugato passage
Later in his poem, DuBois takes that train imagery returns, set to “the prejudice of the ignorant and the
further, openly and wistfully dreaming of a future that ignorance of the blind” (Figure 8 on page 18).
entails a “kingdom of beauty and light,” a post-racial, Here, Bonds resorts to fugue structure, one of the
post-discriminatory future. DuBois’s solution to achieve great achievements of the Western European musical
this kingdom, which will create an equitable world, is tradition, to conjure the prejudice and ignorance of
the “training of little children,” the equal and proper our White-dominated past. The stark open fifths on the
education of all races. opening and closing choral sonorities are redolent of
Finally, as the movement approaches its climax, the the great false climax on the word “strength” in move-
baritone invokes Esau, the biblical figure who betrayed ment five and confirm that we are not quite there yet
his people, as a warning to those who would betray the (Figure 9 on page 19).
glorious kingdom yet to come. Immediately after, the Bonds thus sends us out into the world with a vision
chorus enters in the African American call-and-response of what could be but reminds us there is work yet to be
style heard in the second movement. Soon, in the work’s done. The ideas launched at the composition’s begin-
most glorious and moving passage, the chorus invokes a ning are completed, at least partially, by the final bars.
wordless passage in layered chorus over churning piano As John Michael Cooper writes:
triplets. This passage seems to signify we have reached
To interpret Credo as a
grand cycle whose conclu-
sion completes the ideas
launched at the outset is
to impart to the music an
even greater and more
dramatic sweep than that
of the text. 10

Conductors performing this fi-
nal movement need to be aware
that it is not entirely a triumphant
close.

16 CHORAL JOURNAL November/December 2025 Volume 66 Number 4