Rock My Soul Festival - A Musical Portrait: Price & Bonds at Los Angeles Philharmonic

Inspired by the friendship between composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, whose mutual support helped them break down barriers to have their music heard in the classical music world of the early 20th century, Rock My Soul celebrates historical and present-day collaborations between Black women artists. As two Black women composers working in the 1930s, unrecognized and unsupported by their field and the country in which they lived, Price and Bonds forged a lasting relationship as mentor and student, as musical collaborators, as champions of one another’s art, and as friends. Both Bonds and Price would set numerous “firsts” as milestones in their careers, writing with distinct musical vocabularies that blended their Western classical training with African American styles and forms, and championing messages of Black acceptance and pride in the United States.