In Retirement, Professor Emeritus of Music Michael Cooper Continues to Shed Light on Black Composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds
As Dr. Michael Cooper settles into his next chapter, he is continuing his life’s work of shedding light on Black musicians lost to time and racial prejudice.
Just two weeks before Southwestern University Professor of Music Michael Cooper became Professor Emeritus of Music Michael Cooper, he received a shock in the form of the answer to a question that had been lingering in the back of his mind for four decades.
In the fall of 1986, while pursuing his master’s degree in musicology and percussion at Florida State University, Cooper saw a flyer for a recital at a nearby church. On a whim, he stopped by, where a musician was performing a program of familiar works by mainstream composers. Cooper has forgotten most of the program, but that performance, in a small church in Tallahassee, also included music by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, sparking the beginning of a musical journey that would ultimately define Cooper’s personal and professional life.
“Even though I had an excellent education and knew more music than most of my peers, I had never heard of Florence Price or Margaret Bonds,” he recalled. “I had no idea that they existed and I had never heard a note of their music. Now, here they were, and I was absolutely floored. Why had they been withheld from my view? From there, I left to try to find more. It happened right there.”
Both Florence Price and Margaret Bonds were regarded as pioneers among Black musicians during their lifetimes. Price, a respected member of the Black Chicago Renaissance, was the first Black woman to have a large-scale composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra when her work was featured during the 1933 World’s Fair. She was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic when she died in 1953.
Margaret Bonds, circa 1930. Credit: Georgetown University Libraries, Booth Family Center for Special CollectionsBonds, also from Chicago, became the first Black soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, earning national accolades for popularizing African-American spirituals. By the end of her life, she was working with eight publishers whose doors were normally closed to African American women, but by the time Cooper came of age as a musician just a decade later, her works were largely erased from the annals of music history because of the racism and sexism of the music-publishing industry, the academy, and musical life in general.
“I kept trying to find more music by the two of them,” Cooper said. “Eventually, I realized that nobody else was looking, and that led me to recognize that it’s not fair for me to expect someone else to do something just because I want to see it done. So I took my own archival plunge.”
From that moment forward, Cooper set upon dual paths that would intertwine and intersect for decades to come — one as a student and teacher of music history, both as he was expected to teach it and in a fashion that drew on his distinctive perspectives as a scholar and a musician, and the other as a researcher determined to uncover more about Price and Bonds. Because he had no idea that the concert he attended on that warm spring evening in Tallahassee would change his life, Cooper had not noted the name of the recitalist. He would spend the next 40 years wishing he had.
Cooper’s educational journey saw him travel up the east coast from Florida State to Duke University, where he earned his Ph.D. before beginning his teaching career. After teaching at Duke for several years, he accepted a position at Illinois Wesleyan University, his first taste of a small, liberal arts college. When a similar position opened at the University of North Texas, Cooper settled down in Denton, just north of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
Following several years of teaching at the second-largest college of music in the U.S., Cooper began feeling the desire to get back into the more intimate setting that small, liberal arts colleges provide. When Southwestern posted an opening for a full-time professor of music in 2006, he jumped at the opportunity.
“I fell in love with the intimacy of the learning environment at Southwestern,” Cooper said. “Southwestern offered me bright and motivated students, great faculty, and tremendous support for research. It was a great equation. Teaching and learning are very personal things. Education is very personal. Music is very personal. Southwestern enabled me to get back into that more personal approach to teaching, learning, and music.”
In keeping with Southwestern’s emphasis on continuing faculty research, Cooper set out to help revive the work of Price and Bonds by making their previously unpublished pieces available to the world in print.
From there, he began the arduous task of sorting and cataloging manuscripts. Once organized, Cooper utilized music editing software to create sheet music from the manuscripts, a process in which every note must be manually typed out on a page. Most works require tens of thousands of clicks to recreate.
“It’s actually very addictive,” Cooper said. “The wonderful thing about editing music and doing that typesetting is that you’re sort of replicating the task of composition. You put the music on the page one note at a time and one bar at a time, from beginning to end, and the piece grows before your eyes. You get to learn it from the inside out, albeit without the creative spark that the composers enjoyed.”
With hundreds of original, unpublished works by Price and Bonds at his disposal, Cooper began his publishing journey with a relatively easy piece, Price’s “Song Without Words in G Major.” He edited that piece on March 18, 2018, over three decades after first hearing Price’s music performed by the unknown singer at that church in Tallahassee.
“After I finished the first piece, I thought, ‘my god, I have to do another one,’” Cooper said. “I had expected, since Florence Price was, after all, human, that she would have some good days, some bad days, and some great days. There were no off days. Everything was amazing.”
Since that original edition and its publication by G. Schirmer in 2019, Cooper has gone on to publish 164 works by Florence Price and another 64 pieces by Margaret Bonds. His reproductions of these works have been disseminated to and performed by artists and groups across the country and around the world. Most, if not all, of these works had never been performed, at least in living memory.
“If they were performed, we don’t know about it yet,” Cooper said. “They might have been done in private studios or in a church, and in fact, a lot of them probably were, but we don’t have any documentation of that yet. It’s wonderful to hear them and to have had a hand in bringing them into the world.”
As Cooper continued to conduct his research and publish more and more works by Price and Bonds, he emerged as a leading expert on the two musicians.
A portrait of Florence Price, taken in Chicago by G. Nelidoff. Credit: University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville“Over the course of all those years and all the different kinds of scholarly things that I have done, I picked up a lot of skills, everything from editing to archiving to understanding compositional processes,” he said. “I never saw it being applied to Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, and then, all of a sudden, that’s where I found myself. And miraculously, I had all the tools that I needed. Hardly anybody else has that toolbox. Those who have the archival skills don’t have the passion for Price and Bonds that came, for me, from that unforgettable recital in Tallahassee, and few who love Price and Bonds have much training and experience with the forensics of music manuscripts and archival research.”
In 2022, Cooper was invited to give a presentation at a three-day Margaret Bonds Symposium at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. His prior research had led him to the manuscripts for a musical by Bonds titled “Bitter Laurel,” a work that told the story of Elizabeth Keckley. Born into slavery in the early 1800s, Keckley eventually earned her freedom as the result of her masterful sewing skills. She became the confidante and dressmaker for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as an author and activist.
Cooper discussed “Bitter Laurel” in his presentation at Queens. In a Q&A following the presentation, he was shocked to learn from a student that the University’s main administration building used to be named after the family that enslaved Keckley.
“I was floored. I had no idea,” Cooper recalled. “They had renamed that building in 2020, but even before then, I just didn’t know that was the case.”
After the symposium, Queens’ music director, Dr. Justin Smith, approached Cooper about bringing the “Bitter Laurel” performance to life for the very first time, in an effort to do something right where so much wrong had been done before. Cooper was fully on board. He enlisted Southwestern Part-time Instructor of Music Christopher Washington to help build out the orchestration. The duo then worked with the music department at Queens. “Bitter Laurel” was first performed in April 2026, and Cooper and Washington were invited to Charlotte to attend.
“It was just amazing, because four years ago I had thought that this was going to be fabulous music and a compelling story. When the final notes had sounded, it turned out to be exactly that,” Cooper said.
The unexpected turn of events that led to the world premiere of Margaret Bonds’ “Bitter Laurel” also led to another, in some ways even more surprising, event: an encounter that Cooper had with Dr. Elvira Green, a world-famous singer who traveled to Charlotte to attend the performance of “Bitter Laurel.” A mezzo-soprano who sang over 20 seasons with the NY Metropolitan Opera and has retired to North Carolina, Green knew Margaret Bonds personally and had worked closely with her in New York.
As Cooper and Green bonded over lunch and their mutual admiration of Bonds, Green asked Cooper how he first heard of her music. He eagerly shared his story of attending the 1986 recital in Tallahassee and was stunned by Green’s response.
“She said, ‘I know who the singer was.’ And then came the tears,” Cooper recounted. “Dr. Green informed me that the singer, Lucia Hawkins, was a well-known soprano who had also been in her same vocal studio in New York. Ms. Hawkins, who was very well-known, changed my life. She had spent some time in Tallahassee in the mid-80s before returning to her native Vicksburg, Mississippi, where, coincidentally, Elizabeth Keckley’s mother is buried. She became known as ‘The Songbird of Vicksburg.’ She passed a few years ago, so I will never be able to thank her, but the tears that suddenly flowed down my cheeks when Dr. Green told me who she was were tears of gratitude, undying gratitude. All of a sudden, thanks to Dr. Green’s attendance at ‘Bitter Laurel,’ the burning unanswered question of my life had been answered.”
Little did either Hawkins or Cooper know that the intersection of their lives would lead to the vast discovery and dissemination of music by both Price and Bonds.
“It’s really a remarkable instance of ‘not sought, yet found,’” Cooper said. “A soprano from Vicksburg who knew Margaret Bonds from New York forever changed the life of a musicologist from Tallahassee by singing music he didn’t know existed. Then, 40 years later, when that musicologist and a mezzo-soprano from Greensboro, who also knew both Bonds and Hawkins, finally had lunch, she was able to tell him — contrary to any expectation — who the person who had changed his life was. And in the meantime, he had brought to light hundreds of otherwise obscure compositions by the musicians whose art brought them all together.”
The dual paths that Cooper set out upon in 1986 merged into one at Southwestern. As a music history professor, his classes covered works that spanned from classical antiquity to today. As 20th-century composers, Price and Bonds both had a rightful place in Cooper’s curriculum, giving students an in-depth understanding of their work, taught by a professor who knows it well.
“The students loved it, partly because they know they’re getting something that they weren’t likely to get anywhere else, and partly because the music itself and the life stories behind it are so identifiable,” Cooper said. “As young people who are struggling to find their own voice in the world, my students identify with people whose voice in the world has not yet been found.”
In his final semester before retirement, Cooper taught his favorite class for the final time. A course that he spent years developing, proposing, and refining, “Classical Music in Color” consisted of 16 weeks devoted only to musicians of color.
“This course is the best thing that I’ve ever done in my teaching, and one that I believe is only possible at places like Southwestern,” Cooper said. “All over the United States, the study of music is undergirded by this very racist assumption that when people of color create music, it’s not classical, and if they do create classical music, they’re somehow intruding on ‘white’ music or ‘acting white.’ It’s insulting and just not true. Our students understand this, and they identify with it. As a result, this class, which lays out the genius, beauty, and brilliance of classical music by musicians of color, has been just fantastic. Students say things like ‘I will never think about music the same way again.’”
From his first classes at Duke in 1994 through his time at Illinois Wesleyan and UNT, and ultimately to Southwestern, Cooper estimates that he has taught more than 4,000 students. As he enters his next chapter, this one as a professor emeritus, he bids farewell to the SU classroom but is continuing to research, continuing to learn, and continuing to help revive the suppressed music of Bonds, Price, and other composers, most recently adding the 350+ works of Dr. Clarence Cameron White to the roster of music that inspires him.
“I have, currently, something like 40 more editions that are in various stages of completion,” he said. “There’s no chance I’ll have enough tomorrows to do everything I want to do, but I’ll keep doing this work until I can’t.”
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