What is America's great music (Part 3 of a series)

St. Petersburg's palace of music:  the Mariinsky

As maintained in two previous posts, there exists a sorry commentary on the state of American art music in which our own orchestras do not reflect its existence when playing in the country's greatest showplace--Carnegie Hall--or on tour throughout the world.  It is a demonstrated fact that the great German and Austrian orchestras elect to play German and Austrian music, the Czech's play their music (better than anyone else, I might add), and the Russians present primarily the music of their country.  To support my latter statement, one need only examine the most recent U.S. tour by the renowned Mariinsky Orchestra.  Although the tour culminated with highly regarded Carnegie performances of several Mahler symphonies (in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of that composer's death)  other performances in city's such as Chicago, Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill, NC included Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto and the 15th Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich.

One is left with my previously posed questions.  Are there great American symphonies?  Are there great American operas that have become a part of the international repertory?  What of incidental music, film music, choral works, etc.?  Why must we apologize for a lack of depth (in strict terms of a shortened national chronology) with an almost complete ignore-ance of the music of our time and place?

God bless the people behind the Naxos label, which is almost wholly responsible for increasing the footprint of American (and other country's) music upon the world.  It is this label that has brought us recordings of the symphonies of Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Charles Ives, George Rochberg, and William Schuman.  Looking for a great American symphony?  We could certainly start with these guys and it would be a good bet that only Bernstein and Copland are very well-known beyond our borders.

U.S. Opera tells us that, "Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American operas had trouble gaining a foothold in the opera house. Today, that is slowly changing, although new productions of American works are still rarer than they should be. However, a few works have managed to stay in the repertory, and others have had cultural impacts despite having only a few performances."  Among this group of works includes:

• Carlisle Floyd's Susannah
• Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe
• Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul

The most well-known American works are Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (performed by groups of varying abilities and sizes throughout the nation during the Christmas season) and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.  The U.S. Opera article also notes unknown and practically unperformed operas by Scott Joplin (whose Treemonisha was not premiered until 1975 performances by the Houston Grand Opera) and George Whitefield Chadwick, who wrote The Padrone in 1912 for the Metropolitan Opera but its premiere was shelved "due to its depiction of life among the American poor."

Cutting edge at the stodgy Met?  Maybe under Gelb

Samuel Barber's Vanessa, composed for the Metropolitan in 1958, was intended as a vehicle for Maria Callas, who refused to sing it.   The company truly "played it safe" from 1973 (Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts) to 1991 (Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles).  Since that time the company has been more actively pursuing new American works, including productions by Philip Glass, John Harbison, William Bolcom, and Tobias Picker, as well as new works from other lands.

A 2006 New York Times article by Anne Midgette notes that, "that new American opera — pieces by American composers based on American stories — may be the future of a field fighting the perception that it is static, Eurocentric and outdated."  There are works such as

• Mark Adamo's Little Women (1998) presented by over 40 companies as of 2006.
• Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking
• Philip Glass's Appomattox, which--in 2006--was his 22nd (!) opera.
• John Musto's Volpone 
• and of course, John Adams's Doctor Atomic, seen in nationwide live broadcast by the Met.

In my own personal experience, I have made it almost a crusade to present American music to foreign audiences, AND it has been unanimously well-received.  Of course, I have conducted stalwarts such as

• Copland's Rodeo, the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring (Czech Republic), Billy the Kid (Russia) and An Outdoor Overture (Poland)
• Bernstein's Candide Overture (Czech Republic and Romania)
• Barber's Adagio for Strings (Czech Republic and Poland)

as well as lesser-known pieces such as

• Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2, "Romantic" (Poland)
• George Whitefield Chadwick's "Jubilee" from the Symphonic Sketches (which may have been the Russian premiere of the piece.)

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

And all of this is just a small sampling of the music that is available to contemporary American orchestras.  There is music by American women: Joan Tower, Libby Larson and Jennifer Higdon come immediately to mind.  There is wonderful literature being turned out by contemporary "Romantics" such as Karl Jenkins and Joseph Curiale and of course, our music schools and conservatories continue to turn out extremely gifted young composers with unique voices whose music deserves to be heard.

We have the repertoire.  We just need somebody to step forward and play it:  here and for the world.