Montgomery Variations: Prayer Meeting

The Montgomery Variations is a set of orchestral variations built on a single spiritual, "I Want Jesus to Walk With Me." Bonds gives each variation a title tied to the civil rights movement in Alabama, so the tune keeps returning in changed clothing: sometimes hymn-like, sometimes marching, sometimes torn apart.

"Prayer Meeting" is one of those variations, and it is among the quietest music in the set. Listen first for the spiritual itself, a slow, stepwise melody that leans downward and then lifts, the kind of tune a congregation could sing without a book. Bonds lets it move through the orchestra rather than announcing it in one voice, so a phrase begun by low strings may be answered by winds, in the give and take of a leader and a room full of people responding.

The texture stays warm and unhurried, closer to a hymn played on strings than to a symphonic climax. When it is performed as part of a sequence of variations, the contrast is the point: whatever came before, and whatever storm follows, this movement gathers everything back into a single shared melody. If a program lists only selected variations, expect roughly five minutes here rather than the full set.

Margaret Bonds, born in Chicago in 1913, was a pianist and composer known for her concert settings of spirituals and for her long collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes. In the 1960s she responded to events in Alabama, including the Montgomery bus boycott and the violence met by demonstrators, with an orchestral work that takes the spiritual "I Want Jesus to Walk With Me" as its theme and treats it in a series of variations, each carrying a descriptive title such as "Decision," "Prayer Meeting," and "Dawn in Dixie." Bonds connected the piece to Martin Luther King Jr. and to the movement he led. Like much of her orchestral music, it went unpublished and largely unperformed in her lifetime; she died in 1972. Renewed interest in Bonds in the 2010s and 2020s brought the score to orchestras, recordings, and festival programs, and individual variations now appear on concerts on their own.