Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 9

Celebrating the Ives Sesquicentenary: An American Landmark

The upcoming Sesquicentenary of Charles Ives (1874-1954) is a landmark moment in American cultural history. Not only is he the towering creative genius of American classical music; he links to the highest American cultural pantheon, resonating in countless ways with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville (connections I explore in my book Dvorak’s Prophecy).

Judging from the website bachtrack, Ives is today far more performed in Europe than the US. Judging from Wikipedia, he is still mis-categorized as a “modernist.” The Sesquicentenary is an opportunity to claim Ives for his American time and place: the late Gilded Age and American fin-de-siecle.

Thanks to J. Peter Burkholder, the central celebration will take place at Indiana University/Bloomington, where the Jacobs School of Music is planning a week (October 1 to 6, 2024) of contextualized concerts, cross-disciplinary lectures, and discussions supported by the NEH Music Unwound project that I direct. There will also be NEH-supported Music Unwound Ives festivals at the Brevard Music Center (mid-July, 2024), Bard College (including a Carnegie Hall concert by Bard’s The OrchestraNow – November, 2024), and Chicago (the Chicago Sinfonietta in collaboration with the Rembrandt Chamber Players and Illinois State University/Normal — mid-February, 2025).

The Bloomington festival is notable for the participation of scholars outside Music. These include a major art historian specializing in the 19th century “American Sublime” (Tim Barringer), a major Civil War historian who really knows music (Allen Guelzo), a major Gilded Age historian who can track the etymology of that troubled label (Alan Lessoff). My own contribution will juxtapose Ives with Mahler (who similarly oscillates between the quotidian and the sublime), and with Sibelius and Elgar (who similarly stopped composing, vexed by modernism and modernity, rooted in native landscapes). I already know that I will say:

“Among canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation; he remains a moving target. That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers, a figure protean and iconic, must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. Even our orchestras and instrumentalists perform him far less than they should.

“Ives’ first reputation, congealing midway through the twentieth century, was framed by modernists who pedigreed ‘originality.’ Ives’ ‘experiments’ in tonality and rhythm were compared with those of Arnold Schoenberg – whose music he did not know. This obsession with ‘who got there first?’ pigeonholed Ives as an intriguing historical anomaly rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing.

“Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, it became possible to resituate Ives not as an anomalous victim of repressive materialistic decades, but as a complex product of a dynamic period of  American growth itself undergoing revision. Hence the sesquicentenary opportunity at hand, celebrating the 150th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether.” 

A Great Present-Day Pianist

When I reminisce with pianists of my generation (born 1948), the perennial topic is Great Pianists of the Past. We tediously agree: in those days, famous pianists were great pianists – with their own sound, their own distinctive musical personality projecting into the far reaches of Carnegie Hall. No one could admire equally Arrau, Horowitz, Serkin, Michelangeli, Richter, Gilels, Rubinstein. But in every case: famous for a reason. The same conversation inevitably leads to grousing about today, when fame and stature do not correlate.

However – there is one pianist of my acquaintance who credibly insists that there are Great Pianists of the Present. They simply happen not to be Famous Pianists. Sergei Babayan is such a pianist. 

When I heard him in Tbilisi last June, he played the Bach/Busoni Chaconne followed by Bach’s GoldbergVariations. At Zankel Hall recital tonight, his program included Liszt, Schubert/Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Schumann. 

Babayan in recital is an integrated whole. Physically, he somewhat resembles Arrau, Rubinstein, Gilels – big torso, big hands, short arms and legs. He is one with the piano; the instrument is part of him. He relies on arm and shoulder weight to deeply depress the keys. His sonority is full-bodied and dark. His whispered pianissimos retain body and shape. His fortissimos are plushly upholstered. He does not have to bang. His musical intelligence is probing and informative. He is fearlessly improvisatory. 

Armenian born, he trained in Russia. His lineage includes Vladimir Sofronitzky, who taught Babayan’s teacher Georgy Saradjev. Sofronitzky was a terrifying Scriabin specialist. His live recordings of Schubert songs in Liszt’s transcriptions are memorably authentic. I perhaps detect the influence of Sofronitzky in the Schubert/Liszt set Babayan performed at Zankel. The transcriptions themselves are a phenomenal labor of love (Liszt was extolling songs as yet unknown) informed by love for the keyboard – a conversation between complementary geniuses. Liszt’s retelling of these songs peaks where Schubert is visionary. Transcribing “Schwanengesang,” he tellingly begins not amiably, with “Liebesbotschaft” (as in the published song cycle), but with “Die Stadt” – in which Heinrich Heine evokes a dank and morbid seascape. Liszt’s mastery of the piano’s resources here leads to extremities of virtuosity that the capacious song absorbs and fortifies. Babayan’s rendition was a chilling exercise in musical and emotional imagination – as memorable as Sofronitzky’s live recording.  

Babayan’s Rachmaninoff set began with the Etude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5 – commonly, a fat tune atop pounding chords.  Babayan’s reading was a study in texture and sonority – fresher and more spontaneous than his DG recording (which I just sampled on youtube). 

The program also included a 1983 Fantasia, by Vladimir Ryabov, in memory of Maria Yudina. She, too, was a pianist who took no prisoners. In fact, every one of Babayan’s readings at Zankel bristled with surprises. Nothing was predictable, save the mastery of his pianism.

I am grateful that he is not a brand name. 

The Cultural Cold War Revisited — and Cultural Diplomacy in Africa Today

Leonard Bernstein at a USIA exhibit in Moscow in 1959

The vanishing presence of the arts in the American experience has implications for America’s reputation abroad, and for its pursuit of foreign policy goals.

If the US is in fact embarking on a new Cold War, the cultural Cold War with the USSR is urgently pertinent. My latest “More than Music” program on NPR is “The Cultural Cold War Revisited.” It’s based on my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. 

In a nutshell: the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom was initially a seminal Cold War propaganda instrument. In my book, I argue that, by claiming that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art, it failed to produce credible propaganda. Far more successful was cultural diplomacy with the Soviet Union, beginning in 1959 with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic (a visit about which I have new things to say). But as the Cold War waned, so did cultural diplomacy. So much so that when in 1986 Vladimir Horowitz triumphantly returned to Russia, Ambassador Arthur Hartman had to raise funds on his own.

Today, cultural diplomacy could be a formidable tool in, say, Central Africa, where the US is vying with China to exert influence. My “More than Music” show features remarkable testimony from Alexander Laskaris, the US Ambassador to Chad – who recently hosted the African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. You can hear Sidney Outlaw sing “I am a Pilgrim of Sorrow” for fishermen on an island in Chad – and hear them sing a fishing song of their own in response. 

John Beyrle, former US Ambassador to Russia, contextualizes this vignette. Beyrle persuasively extols cultural diplomacy. He also worries that the arts today wind up “on the chopping block.”

A LISTENING GUIDE. [listen here]

00:00 – Willis Conover’s “Jazz Hour” on the Voice of America and its electrifying impact in the USSR

3:00 – About my new book The Propaganda of Freedom

6:00 – The late Alexander Toradze on how jazz symbolized “American freedoms” in Soviet Russia

10:00 – A knowledgeable Soviet audience boos Benny Goodman because he’s old-fashioned

12:00 – Leonard Bernstein speaks to a Moscow audience about musical bonds

16:25 – Contradicting CIA-sponsored propaganda, Bernstein extols Shostakovich in Russia

18:30 – Former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle on misconceived CIA-sponsored cultural propaganda

21:30 – A triumph of cultural diplomacy: Vladimir Horowitz in Russia (1986) — a visit for which the US ambassador had to raise funds on his own

25:00 – Horowitz performs Schumann before a weeping Moscow audience

30:30 – Ambassador Beyrle: the arts “on the chopping block” once the Cold War waned

34:30 – Ambassador Beyrle on the potential importance of cultural diplomacy in Africa today

35:15 – US Ambassador to Chad Alexander Laskaris on cultural diplomacy in Guinea and Chad

38:25 – Sidney Outlaw singing in Chad

40:00 – Ambassador Laskaris on the arts and US foreign policy

43:00 – William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – a foreign policy opportunity

45:00 – Philadelphia Orchestra President Matias Tarnopolsky on visiting China

Curating American Repertoire in South Dakota

The South Dakota Symphony concert I last wrote about in this space has now come and gone. In every way, it fortified my impression that this is an orchestra that deserves to be a national model.

The program comprised Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. That is: it introduced to Sioux Falls an American masterpiece that is little known and little performed, and revisited an opulent symphonic favorite that interestingly contextualizes Harrison’s genius for fusing Eastern and Western cultural practices. I served as an artistic advisor, scripting a 25-minute preamble with film. The result – I believe — was an object lesson in how to curate important American repertoire, and a showcase for the orchestra’s singular esprit. 

The evening began with the Princess of the Pagodas from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. It served to introduce the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, whose highlights included the Eiffel Tower and the Javanese Pavilion with its never-before-heard gamelan: an epiphany for Paris’s musical community. Ravel attended as an impressionable teenager. Saint-Saens was duly impressed. Debussy experienced a veritable epiphany. All this was narrated and illustrated – and led to a consideration of Lou Harrison’s absorption of gamelan practice. Here the film (by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff) showed gamelan scholar Bill Alves demonstrating how Javanese gamelan evokes “a cosmic hierarchy in sound.” Then Emanuele Arciuli, our wonderful soloist, illustrated at the piano how Harrison’s layered keyboard textures, with their “gongs” in the bass, lyrically re-process Javanese music. For the thirty-minute concerto – to my ears, the most formidable by any American — the Sioux Falls audience was rapt. There was a standing ovation. Arciuli and Delta David Gier repeated the entire Stampede movement – and a second standing ovation was ignited. 

Gier’s performance of Scheherazade, after intermission, was memorably expansive, subtly shaped, intensely felt. For his woodwind soloists, he seamlessly fashioned opportunities for personalized expression. They responded in turn. (The orchestra’s principal oboist, Jeffrey Paul, is one of the most eloquent instrumentalists I have ever encountered. He also composes and conducts.) It is not irrelevant that these players do not perform concerts three and four times a week. More often, they perform as a full-time woodwind quintet. They regularly interact with Native American musicians on reservations throughout the state – the Lakota Music Project I have often written about. That is: their musical lives are varied and whole; their commitment to the South Dakota Symphony transcends rehearsing and performing. In New York, members of the Philharmonic are spared school visits – the orchestra has a separate roster of “educational” players for that. This arrangement circumscribes the roles musicians play. No one is well served, especially today when orchestras and communities no longer mesh – except in fortunate cities like Sioux Falls.

Ancillary to Saturday night’s concert, Emanuele Arciuli – who performs more American music than any American pianist, and has even written a book (in Italian) about it – played an “American Fusion” program at South Dakota State University (which bussed students to the Harrison/Rimsky concert), and a Frederic Rzewski program at the University of South Dakota.

On April 27, Gier conducts Mahler’s Third Symphony in celebration of his twentieth season as Music Director. I’ll be there.

(My 7,000-word American Scholar manifesto, “Shostakovich and South Dakota,” may be read here. My “Shostakovich and South Dakota NPR program may be heard here. The Lou Harrison documentary film that Peter Bogdanoff and I produced for Naxos may be purchased here.)

A Saturday Night Livestream: Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto in South Dakota

I have often extolled Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto as quite possibly the most formidable concerto by any American. And I have often extolled the South Dakota Symphony as a national model. This Saturday night at 8:30 pm ET, the South Dakota Symphony performs the Harrison concerto – a concert that will be livestreamed (but not archived), if you would like to sample how the South Dakota Symphony does things.

The concerto will be directly preceded by a 30-minute scripted preamble with a film created by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff.  We will begin with some Ravel (“The Princess of the Pagodas” from Mother Goose), then explore the 1889 Paris Exposition, with its Javanese Pavilion, which introduced Paris (and the Western world) to gamelan. All of this will eventually lead to a sampling of the Harrison concerto, and a little demonstration of how the piano writing is indebted to the layered textures of Javanese music.

I wrote the script, and will narrate alongside Music Director Delta David Gier. Our soloist – an inspired Harrison exponent – is Emanuele Arciuli. Though Italian, Emanuele has performed more American piano music than anyone else I know, and has also written a book about it (awaiting an English translation).

The second half of the program features Rimski-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a prime example of musical “Orientalism” preceding the East/West fusion seminally clinched by Harrison.  

There will also be a pre-concert talk with film and a post-concert discussion. Tonight, Emanuele and I present an “American Fusion” program at South Dakota State University, which will bus students to Saturday night’s concert. 

To my way of thinking, all this embodies how symphony orchestras should function these days, with dwindling audiences and dissipating cultural memories.

Here’s my program note for Saturday’s concert:

“But my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts? . . . Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises . . . that force one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.” – Claude Debussy

Debussy discovered Javanese music at the 1889 Paris Exposition – the one with the Eiffel Tower. Its Javanese Village was just that, with sixty residents from the Indonesian islands of Java and Sunda. They inhabited a kind of pre-industrial paradise, crafting batiks, weaving straw hats, and – most notably – performing a kind of music and dance as yet wholly unknown in Europe. There were no films or recordings to prepare the shock. France’s musicians and painters were more than galvanized; their vocabulary of gesture and ambience was actually transformed. For Debussy and Maurice Ravel, gamelan embodied sounds and textures previously unimagined. They were merely the first of countless influential Western composers to undergo an Indonesian epiphany. 

A towering figure in this narrative is one of the most formidable of all American composers: Lou Harrison (1917-2003); that he remains little-performed (outside the West Coast) is scandalous. That he doesn’t felicitously fit any musical map is both a proof of his originality and a penalty he pays. The absorption of gamelan elements in his music is so complete that the style, global influences notwithstanding, is all of a piece; the finished product cannot be called “eclectic.”

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, Harrison was a product of the West Coast: facing Asia. He eventually settled in rural Aptos, near Santa Cruz. Ongoing explorations of other cultures was an ongoing Harrison life motif. As a child he studied dance and Gregorian chant. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, he imbibed Chinese opera and purchased huge gongs to supplement instruments he himself created out of discarded brake drums and springs found in junkyards. The 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition introduced him to Indonesian gamelan: a life-long passion. He acquired a similar expertise in Korean and Chinese music.     

Harrison’s music is an original, precise, and yet elusive product of these and other far-flung cultural excursions. And yet his American roots are identifiable. American is his self-made, learn-by-doing, try-everything approach. So is his polyglot range of affinities, unchannelled by any linear narrative of advancement. A composer far ahead of his time, Harrison espoused “world music” before there was a name for it. 

Harrison’s 30-minute Piano Concerto celebrates the grandeur and variety of his musical vision. Harrison’s biographer Bill Alves comments: “It’s easy to get lost in Lou’s eclecticism. He’s really a Romantic at heart.” In fact, it is hard to think of a more persuasively expansive concerto by an American composer. The big sonorities and lean, uncluttered textures connect with the “prairie” mode of Aaron Copland. But Harrison is more polyglot, more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. 

The concerto begins with a fortissimo flourish forecasting its exceptional scope. What follows is an equally exceptional 12-minute movement in sonata form; Sudip Bose, the editor of The American Scholar and a Harrison connoisseur, memorably calls it “as vast as a canyon.” The piano writing is itself highly unusual – and indebted to the layered textures of Javanese gamelan. The second movement “Stampede” is a patented Harrison genre of which the composer writes: “[It] is a large and rambunctious expansion of the European area’s medieval dance form Estampie. The two words are cognate and refer to general noise and bruha-ha and not, as I had originally thought, to any form of ‘stamping’ dance.” The raucous affect is reinforced by occasional use of an octave bar, to produce dissonant tone-clusters. The third movement is an eight-minute Largo hymn. Of the concerto’s brief finale, Harrison writes: “I have written Jalas in a sort of perpetuum mobile style . . . This last movement is meant as a kind of quiet ‘lace-work.’” (By “Jalas,” Harrison refers to a technique in North Indian classical music in which the player interpolates a repeated drone.) The Harrison Piano Concerto is at once original, melodious, and formidably grand.

Our program closes with music as familiar as Harrison’s is not: Rimsky-Korsakov’s sublime Scheherazade (1888). It is perhaps the most famous embodiment of “Orientalism” – an arm’s-length infatuation with the exotic that galvanized many a Russian and European composer before the turn of the twentieth century. In other words: Orientalism prefaces the 1889 Paris Exposition – it celebrates a mainly imaginary East, preceding direct exposure to the real thing. And there is nothing wrong with that, especially when the creative imagination is as opulent as Rimsky’s is here. 

In 1874 Rimsky visited the town of Bakchisaray, near Sevastopol on the southern coast of Crimea. He marvelled at “the coffee houses, the shouts of its venders, the chanting of the muezzins on the minaret, the services in the mosques, and the oriental music.” Thirteen years later, he embarked on an orientalist fantasy inspired by The Arabian Nights (collecting Arabic, Persian, and Indian tales) and called it Scheherazade. It is she, in the Arabian Nights, who spins a vast web of tales, one per night, for 1,001 nights in order to pre-empt the Sultan’s vow to kill each of his wives. Rimsky discouraged an overly programmatic reading of the four movements (he later suppressed the movement titles listed on tonight’s program page). He did concede that the solo violin evoked Scheherazade “as she tells her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan.” He further wrote: “In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct only slightly the listener’s fancy on the path that my own fancy had traveled . .  . All I wanted was that the hearer. . . should carry away the impression that it is undoubtedly an Oriental narrative of numerous and varied fairy-tale marvels, and not merely four pieces played one after the other and based on themes common to all four.”

Mahler, Bernstein, and “The Marriage”

What did Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein have in common? As is well known, Bernstein was a triumphant advocate of Mahler’s symphonies at a moment when they had yet to enter the mainstream repertoire. And both were outsiders – Mahler as a Jew in Vienna, and Bernstein as someone trying to resolve the oxymoron “American classical musician.”

But in my NPR interview yesterday about my new novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York, I found myself talking about what they did not have in common. Bernstein, conducting the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, was an exemplary music director. Mahler, conducting the Philharmonic from 1908 to 1911, was judged a “failure” – not as a conductor, but as a cultural leader. Exploring this verdict, I contrast Bernstein’s excavation of little-known American works with Mahler’s inattention to the fledgling American composer. In the process, I have occasion to mull the challenge facing the Philharmonic and other American orchestras right now – a moment when the role of the “music director” must be redefined (the topic of my 7,000-word rant in the current American Scholar).

I also discuss how I found myself sympathetic to the plight of Gustav’s controversial wife, Alma – and so discovered how historical fiction could be a crucial tool for the cultural historian.

Ultimately, Mahler’s supreme importance was not as a conductor or a husband, but as a great composer – a verdict supported by a supremely beautiful orchestral extract (from the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth) at the close.

Also: I am delighted to announce that Wolke Verlag will publisher a German translation of my novel. 

My thanks, as ever, to Rupert Allman and Jenn White at WAMU, the DC public radio station that produces “1A” – home to my “More than Music” features, and also yesterday’s interview.

“The Propaganda of Freedom” — A Podcast

When was the last time an American President cited the arts as a vital component of the ‘”state of the union”? John F. Kennedy did, in 1963. That’s the starting point of my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the Cultural Cold War (currently available at a 30 per cent discount via University of Illinois Press).

It’s also the starting point of a 30-minute “Propaganda of Freedom” podcast interview with my friend Richard Aldous (biographer of Arthur J. Schlesinger) for The American Purpose.

In the same breath that he extolled the arts, Kennedy made a counter-factual Cold War claim: that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art. In my book – and in the first part of the podcast – I trace the lineage of that seminal claim back to Igor Stravinsky (!), who insisted on the autonomy of the creative act. He had to believe that, in exile from his beloved Russian homeland in Paris and Los Angeles. So this was a polemic that travelled from Stravinsky to his friend Nicolas Nabokov to his friend Arthur Schlesinger, thence to the President’s ear. Nabokov, at the time, headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom – the CIA’s cultural Cold War propaganda instrument. It’s the same line of thought that prompted Americans – including an eminent educational theorist and the head of the New York City musician’s union – to urge Shostakovich to defect to “freedom” so he could unfetter his muse.

The second part of the podcast, beginning seven minutes in, cites Shostakovich’s claim that he was “freer” composing in Russia than were American composers – say, Stravinsky himself, free not to matter in Hollywood. That the arts mattered more for Soviets than Americans is a core contention of my book. In the podcast, I recall experiencing the Leningrad Philharmonic on its only US tour in 1962 – and discovering that “the world’s greatest orchestra” wasn’t in Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia after all. (To sample the Leningrad Philharmonic at full throttle in live performance, check out the mightiest Tchaikovsky performance I know, right here.)

Part three (11:45) of the podcast deals with American naivete and misinformation during the cultural Cold War – e.g., my discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Leonard Bernstein got better reviews in Moscow than in New York City. I also tell the story of the Soviet Embassy hosting a post-concert reception for Van Cliburn in DC following his triumph in the 1958 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow – in the wake of which President Eisenhower told Cliburn he was off to Camp David for the weekend and would have to miss his DC performance. (Vice President Nixon didn’t attend either.)

Part four of the podcast (17 minutes in) is about the state of the arts today – the devastating loss of cultural memory; the urgency of increased government arts subsidies and renewed cultural diplomacy.

My thanks to Richard for hosting this animated exchange.

“Celebrating Harry Burleigh” on October 14

I’ll be joining the baritone Sidney Outlaw – an exceptional artist – in songs and spirituals by Harry Burleigh on Saturday, October 14, at the Newark School of the Arts. It’s a one-hour presentation, at noon, followed by a master class. It’s free but you need to reserve tickets at pmolina@newarkschoolofthearts.org

Burleigh – once Dvorak’s assistant in New York — is mainly remembered for turning spirituals into deeply felt concert songs. But his art songs – a separate repertoire – deserve fresh advocacy.

Our program will include “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One” – arguably Burleigh’s peak achievement. A supreme American art song, it both sets and confutes Langston Hughes. As I’ve observed in this space and in the Wall Street Journal :

“Processing Hughes’s expression of impatience, Burleigh turns the poem upside down. . . . Not for Burleigh is Langston Hughes’s agitation, or the activism of a Paul Robeson. Nor is there the merest hint of modernist dissonance. We do not have to agree with him in order to admire the eloquence with which he here sustains his credo . . . that ‘deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man—every man—will be free.’”

Sidney Outlaw will also be heard in recital at the Manhattan School of Music on October 12. And he can be heard on my upcoming NPR “More than Music” program on “Cultural Diplomacy Revisited” (Oct. 16)– memorably singing Gershwin and spirituals to fishermen in Chad.

“Shosakovich in South Dakota” P. S.

I cannot resist this postscript to my 7,000-word manifesto, in the current American Scholar, about the South Dakota Symphony.

If you happen to watch the live-stream [embedded above] of their Shostakovich 7 concert, with its 40-minute preamble, you will discover at the end an expression of pride and accomplishment the likes of which I have never before witnessed at a professional symphonic concert. It more resembles the incredulous thrill experienced by gifted conservatory instrumentalists communally discovering a great piece of music. Nothing is pro forma about this SDSO demonstration – it gathers force as Delta David Gier invites members of the orchestra to stand in turn. 

At 1:54:58, you will see Yi-Chun Lin, the longtime SDSO principal violist, pump her arms when her section is acknowledged. And no wonder: just listen, at 1:28:00, to how magnificently these seven players sing this symphony’s most beautiful song. For that matter: at 1:31:32 there is a place in the slow movement that demands maximum commitment if Shostakovich’s sprawling Adagio is to retain shape: the entire string choir, unsupported by winds, recapitulates the main chorale theme fortissimo. The South Dakota players clinch this fulcrum moment. 

And listen to Gier and his orchestra clinch the symphony’s titanic ending, beginning at 1:48. 

On October 28, the South Dakota Symphony presents the most formidable of all American concertos: Lou Harrison’s, for piano and orchestra. The performance, with Emanuele Arciuli, will be preceded by a thirty-minute scripted introduction with film. Ancillary concerts will be heard on three university campuses. (You can sample Arciuli’s beautiful performance of the Harrison concerto with Dennis Russell Davies and the Leipzig Radio Orchestra on my “More than Music” Lou Harrison tribute on NPR.)  Most American orchestras do not even know this music exists.  

“Shostakovich in South Dakota — A Manifesto for the Future of American Classical Music”

My “manifesto for the future of American classical music,” in the current issue of The American Scholar, attempts in 7,000 words to present a viable blueprint for change.

My main point of reference is a contextualized performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony last February by the South Dakota Symphony – which I write “may plausibly be considered the most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra in the United States. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged.” 

On that occasion, Shostakovich’s 80-minute symphony was preceded by a forty-minute “dramatic interlude” with musical examples, beginning with music from the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – the lascivious bedroom scene that in 1936 so aroused Stalin’s ire that the composer was denounced in Pravda. The symphony’s seminal impact on Russian morale during the 1941-44 Nazi siege of Leningrad was explored. For many in the audience, this story evoked the resilience of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invading army today.  For a local clergyman, the  concert “renewed my confidence in the meaning of music, in the meaning of the arts.”

There were linked activities on two university campuses, including run-out performances of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet. It, too, was also elaborately contextualized. David Reynolds, who oversees performing arts at South Dakota State University, called the entire exercise “a wonderful opportunity to touch students who are growing up with social media and other nontraditional resources. These are the folks who will one day decide the role of the arts our public and private schools.”

In my article I propose three main prescriptions:

1.The role of the music director should be radically redefined. He or she should aspire to cultural leadership, armed with a mission distinctive to the community at hand – a case in point being Delta David Gier, who has been music director of the South Dakota Symphony since 2004. Gier moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there. I cite as a counter example Andris Nelsons, music director of today’s Boston Symphony, who also leads Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. This coming season, Nelsons will conduct 34 of 66 subscription concerts in Boston. (In the BSO’s heyday under Arthur Nikisch, Karl Muck, and Serge Koussevitzky — decades during which the orchestra was Boston’s cultural hub, and during which the Tanglewood Festival was established as [be it remembered] an American music laboratory — guest conductors were few and far between.)  

2.The concert format should be re-imagined, with emphasis on contextualizing the music at hand. Once you do that, with orchestras large or small, you wind up with events ideal for linkage to schools at every level, The orchestra becomes a humanities institution with education at its core – not a satellite operation.

3.American orchestras should – at last — curate the American musical past — just as American museums curate the American past in the visual arts. This would require some scholarly assistance.  

These recommendations do not begin with a mad rush to program a lot of music by women and composers of color. But – as the South Dakota example shows (see below) – an orchestra focused on serving its community will organically gravitate to serving diversity and inclusivity. 

Also, these recommendations do not begin with marketing and development strategies. Rather, they propose a template that inspires audiences to entrust an orchestra with cultural leadership. I write:

“Early in his tenure, Gier proposed that the South Dakota Symphony initiate an annual Martin Luther King concert. He was taken aside and informed that, in South Dakota, racial bias targeted Native Americans. He next hosted a lunch for Lakota and Dakota leaders. ‘I went into that with all kinds of ideas about how we could collaborate,’ he recalls. ‘But I was met with distrust—which in retrospect is not surprising. . . . It was my first lesson in learning to listen. At the end of that lunch, a man introduced himself and said, “You’re crazy. But I’d like to try to help.” That was Barry LeBeau, an actor and lobbyist. I spent a couple of years making intermittent trips around the state with Barry introducing me to tribal elders and leaders”. . .  Gier had arrived in Sioux Falls with the notion that “an orchestra should serve its unique community uniquely.” He wasn’t sure what that would look like—but he knew he had never seen it happen.” 

The result was the Lakota Music Project, which links the South Dakota Symphony to Indian reservations throughout the state. Magdalena Modzelewska, the SDSO’s principal second violinist since 1998, testifies: “It’s really stunning, what’s happening with those kids, the light that we see on their faces. For quite a few, it’s changed their lives. They were on the verge of something awful—and it pulled them through. Some have gone on to college to study music—where it was not even a consideration before.” Of the Lakota Music Project experience, Modzelewska says, “In Indian culture we’ve found such peace and goodwill. It’s truly remarkable how similar our musical goals are. We get to share something sublime.” 

My article includes a lot of pertinent history. I conclude this section by writing:

“The quintessential American orchestra was Leopold Stokowski’s in Philadelphia; it produced a seamless, kaleidoscopic, even cinematic New World sound that was sui generis, and that served sui generis New World readings of Old World masterworks. That many members of other major American orchestras retained German, French, or Italian musical roots was decisive. Here, the most striking example was the astounding Metropolitan Opera orchestra as heard on broadcasts from the 1930s and ’40s. The players were predominantly Italian. Some had played in the Met pit under Toscanini, even Mahler. They intimately knew the operas. . . . Today’s  Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in comparison, is uprooted: faceless and tame. And the Stokowski lava flow is not even a memory. . . . 

“And so, South Dakota becomes a manifesto. I would never propose that the Vienna Philharmonic’s Bruckner performances add a 40-minute preamble. The Berlin Philharmonic performing Beethoven, the Mariinsky Orchestra’s peerless Shostakovich performances under Valery Gergiev are self-sufficient. But if you were to ask me whether the New York Philharmonic should perform the Leningrad Symphony sans commentary of any kind, I would certainly opine: those times are past. . . .  

“At South Dakota State University, every student with whom I spoke about the Leningrad Symphony performance [to which they were bussed by the university] mentioned the 40-minute preamble as a crucial ingredient. . . . My own 26-year-old daughter watched the Leningrad performance via livestram. When it was over, she phoned me from New York to say how she swished that her friends could experience ‘concerts like that.’”

My American Scholar piece concludes:

“As of this writing, New York City’s Public Theatre has announced that it will lay off 19 percent of its staff. The Brooklyn Academy of Music will reduce its staff by 13 percent. We will be reading about similar arts cutbacks elsewhere. Cycles of ‘emergency’ Covid arts funding by Congress have come and gone with nothing to take their place. The usual belt tightening will not suffice—and nowhere more than in the symphonic sector. 

“Quite obviously, mine are inconvenient opinions. You will not find them emphasized at meetings and workshops of the League of American Orchestras. They do not mesh with prevalent norms for administrative staffing. Orchestras lack resources to adequately scour and contextualize the American musical past. Conductors lack the skill, the time, or the interest to fashion the teaching tools deployed by Delta David Gier—or by Leonard Bernstein decades before him. For many of our larger orchestras, shrinking audiences will logically dictate fewer concerts. And new audiences, generally, will present new needs. 

“Five months ago, the NEH funded a fourth installment of Music Unwound, supporting thematic festivals curating the American musical experience. The concerts will elaborately contextualize the repertoire at hand. All six participating orchestras, including the South Dakota Symphony, partner with universities. Unbeknownst to many in the American orchestral community, a new moment is upon us: new templates for format and repertoire, templates tangible yet mainly dormant. They have in fact been awaiting our attention for quite some time.”