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What is American music? And, perhaps more to the point, why do we care so
much?
I remember being asked in Prague not so long ago, What is your obsession,
you Americans, with American music? said Robert Spano, the music
director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which will perform at SHIFT on
March 31. The only answer I could give ... was: Its because we dont know
who we are, and so were endlessly fascinated, because there are so many
things that make up America ... so much to wrestle with and balance and try
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The democracy of American music - The Washington Post 3/26/17, 11)24 PM
Indeed, the most telling thing about the question What is American music?
may be simply that we keep asking it and asking it and asking it.
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The democracy of American music - The Washington Post 3/26/17, 11)24 PM
Shadle cant fully make a case for these forgotten works as lost masterpieces.
Some of the pieces he describes, created in the name of finding an American
voice, sound like curiosities now: a Santa Claus Symphony by William
Henry Fry (1853), or a sprawling 14-movement Hiawatha: An Indian
Symphony, by Robert Stoepel (1859). In an effort to be distinctively
American and to create music that every listener could understand,
composers took up American subjects and instrumental sound effects
(drums standing in for gunfire in musical depictions of the Battle of Bunker
Hill, for instance), only to come under fire from critics who felt that program
music was a lower form than abstract music. But when a composer did write
abstract music, it was often seen as too derivative of European models. That
dynamic hasnt entirely disappeared.
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The democracy of American music - The Washington Post 3/26/17, 11)24 PM
their music is now being revived on, to name one example, Naxoss
American Classics series). And many 19th-century assumptions about
American music have survived into the 20th and even 21st centuries:
American music is still often viewed as lighter than European music, more
illustrative and more populist. The tension between populist American
music and absolute American music was as alive in 1876, when John
Knowles Paine was praised for writing an abstract rather than
programmatic symphony, as in 1971, when Leonard Bernstein was criticized
for folding Broadway and rock elements into his hybrid Mass. Only in
recent decades has it started to soften.
Its not only 19th-century American work thats neglected. Last summer, the
Aspen Music Festival and School (where Spano is also music director)
focused its summer season on midcentury Americans in the hope that
turning the spotlight on Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Peter Mennin and
others might help bring them back into the repertory. Similarly, Leonard
Slatkin worked hard for years to turn the National Symphony Orchestra into
a distinctively American, national orchestra; but those efforts seem to have
left relatively little lasting mark on the institution.
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The democracy of American music - The Washington Post 3/26/17, 11)24 PM
Take Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013: her piece Lo,
which the North Carolina Symphony will play at SHIFT on March 29, and
which she wrote at a residency at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in 2015, is
her first-ever work for orchestra. Shaw, 35, born in North Carolina, trained
as a violinist and also sings professionally. She doesnt have a career in
Europe yet; but she has collaborated with Kanye West.
Lo, she says, is a kind of conversation with American optimism and how it
expresses itself in music. But its not a deliberate attempt to be American.
The orchestra, she says, is a very particular kind of wood to carve from,
and has a whole tradition with it. If I write something that sounds like
[Aaron] Copland, thats intentional. Its a conversation with Copland. But
its not about a national identity. When Im writing music, Shaw says, I try
to block those conversations out as much as I can.
In the 19th century, there was much debate about what authentic
American music might sound like. In the 21st century, we have a whole
catalogue of examples. Yet stereotypes tend to persist. Copland has been
effectively embraced as our national composer, mainly on the strength of
Appalachian Spring, and his work is often said to evoke American
landscapes. Bernstein offers syncopated athleticism and a stylistic melting
pot. Ives is a maverick; Cage, an iconoclast. American music is new and
bracing, yet also lithe and melodic.
Some are more precise. In 1948 Virgil Thomson, the composer and critic,
identified a couple of specific compositional tics he felt were distinctive to
American composers (the nonaccelerating crescendo and a steady ground-
rhythm of equalized eighth notes, for the record). Yet Thomson was the
least prescriptive of observers. The way to write American music is simple,
he wrote. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of
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The democracy of American music - The Washington Post 3/26/17, 11)24 PM
The SHIFT festival features the Boulder Philharmonic on March 28, the
North Carolina Symphony on March 29, the Atlanta Symphony on March
31, and the Knights on April 1, with free outreach events on other days.
Tickets are $25; residency events, like the Boulder Philharmonics nature
walk on March 27, are free.
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