Made in America, but Rarely Played Here

Four years ago, the BBC Symphony held an extensive festival at the Barbican Centre in London devoted to the music of Charles Ives, America’s first great, pioneering composer. The British didn’t get everything entirely right--some performances were a bit on the bland side, and the vile-looking hot dogs and a peculiarly greasy “American” pudding that were consumed with gusto needed work.

Strangest of all was the constant reaction of the locals to a visiting American. “Don’t you hear this sort of thing all the time?” they would ask, thinking how unnecessary it would be for them to hop across the pond to hear Vaughan Williams or Delius.

“Well, no, not exactly,” I told them, puzzled as to how I could explain that the American orchestra is, and always has been, a profoundly un-American institution.

Most orchestras in this country do not know and do not care about American music, and they are convinced that you and I don’t care or want to know about it either. They see their mandate as one of protecting culture, in this case, a culture produced in Europe 100 or 200 years ago. They therefore make it their business to protect us from ourselves.

No city is more American than Philadelphia. Yet the fabulous Philadelphians (as the city’s orchestra likes to call itself) are hardly fabulous Americans in the 12-CD set of live performances the orchestra recently issued to celebrate its history. It contains only enough American music to fill a single CD, including such cautious choices as Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” A recent Chicago Symphony self-produced 10-CD set has only a slightly better average. And take a look at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s classical series at the Hollywood Bowl--that most populist of venues. Around 5% of the music programmed for this summer was made in the United States.

Orchestras have the numbers to justify their actions. The 91-year-old Elliott Carter may be the universally acknowledged dean of American composers, but program an all-Carter concert and watch the audience-alienating instrumental complexity of the music empty a house. An all-John-Adams evening will do better with crowds, and all Copland better still (if the works are the popular ones). But serve up conventional Beethoven or Mozart--or Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff--as the bill of fare, and a large audience with an appetite for music will materialize as if out of thin air. It’s true in Los Angeles, and it is true across America.

Audiences vote with their ticket purchases. But they also choose from what is presented to them. As far back as 1849, Thoreau insisted that his fellow citizens defy party hacks and power brokers who put the presidential candidates on the ballot. The voter, he wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue.” Despite the primary system, we don’t seem to have made much progress in politics in 150 years. Nor in music.

The Bowl management may consider itself a benign demagogue, appealing to what it judges to be the comfort level and interests of a broad audience. It feels constrained by the necessity of selling enough tickets to help finance the orchestra’s more artistically vibrant (and, to be fair, more American) winter season. But audience preconceptions come from what is made available to them.

Consequently, listeners, who are inadequately exposed to the sheer breadth of American music, are easily convinced that it is weird, inaccessible and probably not very good--unless it’s by Gershwin. But could it be that unlike American literature, American movies, American dance, American painting, American sculpture, American video art, American architecture or American theater, virtually all of American art music fails to connect with American lives? A few years ago, when the New York Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest orchestra and historically the one with the strongest commitment to American music, featured some of our most important composers, including Ives, it labeled them eccentrics.

The San Francisco Symphony has a better term, mavericks, which it uses to relate American composers from Ives and Copland through Cage, Adams and Meredith Monk to the intrepid spirit of the country. During its three-week “American Mavericks” festival in June, the San Francisco Symphony proved something that should be obvious but isn’t. Play the music that was made for the people in the audience; play it not out of duty but out of love; and the people will come and they will cheer and they will not want to go home.

The programming was as varied as the American experience, covering the whole range of what we think music can be. Edgar Varese’s “Ameriques” is loud and ugly and fast and furious; yet experiencing its riveting power felt as exhilarating as absorbing the energy of a modern city’s streets. The last movement of Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan is so captivatingly tuneful that Michael Tilson Thomas memorably described it to a post-concert gathering as something he sings to himself when he goes hiking and needs some encouragement to make it up one more steep hill.

What made the San Francisco Symphony’s festival such a success was a culmination of Tilson Thomas’ insistence, over his four years as music director, upon symphonic music as a living, local art form. And now the whole city (City Hall politicos, Castro Street gays, Pacific Heights matrons, Mission District dot-commers, students and the feisty local press) takes pride in discovering and celebrating its musical heritage.

An example was the festival’s resuscitation of Henry Cowell’s 1929 Piano Concerto. Here was a Northern California composer who took nothing for granted, investigating the piano’s sonic possibilities by percussively banging on the keyboard or opening the lid and delicately strumming the strings. And once the soloist, Ursula Oppens, had finishing attacking the keys with palms and fists to riveting rhythms, the hall erupted in a gleeful standing ovation.

No translation was necessary, which isn’t the case at most orchestra concerts. The syncopated rhythms, a multicultural attitude of employing the piano’s unusual sounds to imply other musical cultures, and a touch of Chico Marx at the piano remind us of who we are. Yet I wonder if there is a music director in America besides Tilson Thomas who knows Cowell’s 20 symphonies. I’ve never heard one in concert; have you?

Whatever that nonsense about “eccentrics,” the New York Philharmonic last year released a two-volume, 10-CD boxed set devoted exclusively to performances of American music languishing in its archives. The set was hailed as a revelation in the New York and European press. The orchestra says that most people who hear it are astonished at how they automatically connect with the music. Many players in the orchestra are said to be surprised as well.

Actually, the set is an inadequate survey of the full spectrum of American accomplishment; the orchestra has neglected even the audience-friendly side of the experimental New York schools (no Morton Feldman or Philip Glass). But it nevertheless offers dozens of works that immediately grab the attention. Many of them, say, Ned Rorem’s Third Symphony and William Bolcom’s Clarinet Concerto, are written in a style that the average listener would so clearly recognize as “American” that one has to wonder whether a Hollywood Bowl audience wouldn’t identify with this music far more readily than with a 120-year-old symphony by Cesar Franck.

Every American orchestra, of course, plays a smattering of American music. And the Los Angeles Philharmonic, apart from the Hollywood Bowl, does a better job than most, especially when you factor in its Green Umbrella series. The upcoming season includes concerts devoted to Copland and to Adams, and other American works of interest have been programmed (especially notable: Peter Lieberson’s new piano concerto and a Harrison suite).

But that hardly changes the fact that American composers are foreigners in their own concert halls. European music is a huge and wonderful achievement that tells universal truths, and we need to honor its traditions. And not all American music will make an immediate connection with an American audience--some can sound strange, especially to our Europeanized ears. We are, after all, a country of non-traditionalists, free spirits and inventors.

I would argue, however, that the great European music of the past ultimately means more to us when it is appreciated in the context of our lives and times. Far more eccentric than the music written by Americans is the notion that the American concert-goer automatically accepts the language of 19th century Germany, Russia or France as the natural American vernacular for the 21st century.

Is the next step to vote for Bush as czar, Gore as kaiser or Nader as emperor?