Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

Program music, a category that applies explicitly to Mahler’s early symphonies and implicitly to all of them, had a long and complicated history by the time he made his first attempts. Purely instrumental works by Froberger, Frescobaldi, Kuhnau (Biblische Historien), Bach (Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo) and François Couperin (Le Parnasse ou l’Apothéose de Lully); Parisian symphonies ca. 1800 by composers such as François Lesueur, Francesco Antonio Rosetti, and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf; and “characteristic” music of early nineteenth-century Austria and Germany formed the backdrop of better-known efforts by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, all of which played in Mahler’s mind when he began to forge his own path. The survey and typology provided by this chapter serve to frame Mahler’s conflicted attitude, which led him ultimately to a public repudiation of programmaticism, but not a private one.

This chapter explores the environment of programmatic music-making that centered on the so-called “progressive” composers Liszt, Wagner, and their acolytes, contextualizes the ongoing debates between absolute music and program music that they occasioned, and considers various programmatic compositions outside of that narrow tradition. It gives particular attention to the forty-year period between the appearance of most of Liszt’s symphonic poems and Strauss’s tone poems, in which Hans von Bronsart, Hans von Bülow, Alexander Ritter, Felix Draeseke, and other students of the New German School sought to develop tenets of program music with limited success. Just as integral to the success of program music were the sites and contexts of its performance, as Vienna, Paris, Madrid, and New York welcomed and rejected program music in equal measure. These circumstances shaped Strauss to be a composer open toward, but also healthily suspicious of, program music and its past practitioners.