Dreams Realized: Expression and Polystylism in the Art Song Settings of Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variation”

This paper presents a side-by-side comparison of Florence Price’s (1887–1953) and Margaret Bonds’s (1913–1972) settings of Langston Hughes’s (1902–1967) poem, “Dream Variation.” Both composers completed advanced degrees in music and had remarkable careers in performance and composition despite facing numerous race- and gender-based social barriers. Crossing paths with many notable artists, writers, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance and later the Chicago Renaissance, they both knew Langston Hughes personally and incorporated his texts into many of their art-song settings. Their settings of “Dream Variation” combine elements from their classical compositional training with characteristic features of African American musical traditions. Both songs, in turn, highlight Hughes’s themes of toil and rest, day and night, and dreams of freedom and repose through the use of Signifyin’. As analysis reveals, the songs’ key-area associations, pitch collections, and harmonies, as well as alterations of the original text, reflect the composers’ expressive formal and phrase-structural choices for enhancing the poem’s message.

-with support from Working Group MP3: Music Theory Examples by Women