Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the study score for composer Margaret Bonds’ setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Credo” with Hildegard Publishing Company. Cooper published the first edition of this work, which Du Bois’ widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, pronounced “a work of art that is eternal – that will live as long as people love each other and really believe in brotherhood,” back in 2020, and in that guise, Bonds’ “Credo” has been performed dozens of times on both sides of the Atlantic, earning a solid place in the modern concert repertoire. That score and the orchestral parts were available only on a rental basis, however. The present study score, available to libraries and individuals, as well as performing ensembles, will finally enable “Credo” to be studied, taught, and discussed as a worthy peer of iconic orchestral and orchestral/choral works by Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Mahler, and other canonical white Euro-American male composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Four Pieces for Piano Solo by Will H. Dixon with Recital Publications (Fayetteville, AR). Dubbed “the original dancing conductor” by James Weldon Johnson in his iconic memoir Black Manhattan, Dixon (1879-1917) was one of the leading musical lights of the generation of African Americans who lived and worked in Manhattan’s “Tenderloin District” in the generation leading to the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Dixon, an actor, playwright, composer, pianist, and singer, was featured as a composer and performer on the great stages of Europe in the first decade of the dawning twentieth century. His music is a rich synthesis of African American vernacular musical traditions and Euro-American classical idioms. Most of his more than 100 surviving works remain unpublished. Dr. Cooper published these four from the privately curated Barnes/Dixon/Meyers Historical Harlem Papers, Archives, and Musical Manuscripts Collection. The volume contains two maxixes (Brazilian tangos) and two valses lentes (slow, romantic waltzes).

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Twelve Art Songs and Spirituals by Margaret Bonds, Florence B. Price, and Clarence Cameron White with Classical Vocal Reprints (Fayetteville, AR). The volume includes Cooper’s first four published editions of music by Clarence Cameron White, who before his posthumous erasure was considered the leading African American composer of classical music. The work also includes three never-before-published compositions by Florence B. Price (among these a moving setting of the first three stanzas of Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring”) that Price wrote when she learned of the surrender of Nazi Germany, as well as five songs by Margaret Bonds that may all be considered revelatory, each in its own way. This volume brings the total number of Cooper’s first editions of music by Price to 152 and that of music by Bonds to 45.

For the first time (and almost certainly also the last), Professor of Music Michael Cooper was quoted at some length in an article by Investor’s Business Daily. Titled “Florence Price Composed Lasting Beauty Amid Horrific Tragedy” and written by Paul Katzeff, the article is in the journal’s “Leaders and Success” column. Cooper’s remarks dealt partly with issues of Price’s biography but mostly with the agency of racist and sexist music publishers in ensuring that Price’s music would be largely forgotten in the decades following her death in 1953. The article can be read here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper has won the 2025 Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music for his book Margaret Bonds: The “Montgomery Variations” and Du Bois “Credo” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). This was the first book-length study of Margaret Bonds and her music (followed in Spring 2025 by Cooper’s biography of Margaret Bonds published with Oxford University Press). At just 164 pages, it’s a slight book, but not an insubstantial one. Adjudicators praised it for its “exceptional interdisciplinary analysis” and described it as “illuminating,” “monumental,” and “revolutionary.” More information about the honor can be found here and here.