Spiritual Suite

• Bonds composed this three-movement piano suite gradually during the 1930s and 40s.¹
• Bonds premiered the work’s last two movements in a recital in New York’s Town Hall on February 7, 1952. 
• The third movement, “Troubled Water,” was the only portion of the suite published during Bonds’s lifetime. It was published in 1967.² Thanks to that, it became Bonds’s best-known and most-performed piano composition.³

Movements 

1. The Valley of the Bones. This movement is based on the spiritual “Dry Bones.” 
2. The Bells. This movement is based on the spiritual “Peter, Go Ring Them Bells.”  
3. Troubled Water. This movement is based on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”⁴

1. Margaret Bonds’s Spiritual Suite, performed by Fernando Garcia,” IU Jacobs School of Music (May 5, 2021), https://blogs.iu.edu/africandiaspora/2021/05/05/margaret-bondss-spiritual-suite-performed-by-fernando-garcia/. 
2. Anna Celenza, ”Margaret Bonds: Composer and Activist,” Georgetown University Library (2017), accessed March 2, 2022, https://library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/margaret-bonds-composer-and-activist.
3. “Margaret Bonds’s Spiritual Suite, performed by Fernando Garcia,” IU Jacobs School of Music.
4. Ibid.