America Singing: An Americana Playlist

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Walt Whitman

As our country celebrates the 247th anniversary of our independence, I invite you to listen to these thirteen works by Americans — some living, some dead; some native-born, and some born in other lands.

No selection of American music — certainly not one this short — could be comprehensive. An all-inclusive view of the complex, thrilling, puzzling, heartbreaking and magnificent phenomena that constitute the United States of America is perhaps not possible. But each one of these pieces and performances represents something unmistakably American, something that could only have come into being in this country, among this people.

1. Joan Tower: Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman

Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, Joan Tower has a doctorate in composition from Columbia University and is one of the founders of the Da Capo Chamber Players. Her composition Made in America won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. She currently is on the faculty of Bard College.

The first of her six compositions entitled “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” had its first performance in 1987.

2. Nkeiru Okoye: African Sketches: II. Dusk

Nkeiru Okoye was born in 1972 in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She studied music and Africana studies at Oberlin, and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Rutgers. Her works include Voices Shouting Out (2002), an orchestral work commissioned by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the 2014 opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (for which Okoye also wrote the libretto), commissioned by the American Opera Project.

This performance by pianist Maria Thompson Corley of the second movement of Okoye’s African Sketches is from a 2022 album on the MSR Classics label of music by women of African descent.

3. Margaret Bonds: Credo: VI. I believe in Liberty

John Banther and I had a conversation about a work by Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) on a Classical Breakdown episode earlier this season (Bill Bukowski had featured that same work previously on Choral Showcase). A Chicago native, Bonds collaborated frequently with Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Her 1965 choral-orchestral Credo is a setting of a 1904 text by W. E. B. DuBois; the sixth movement of the work includes these words:

I believe in Liberty for all men; the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of God and love.

4. Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate: Tracing Mississippi (Concerto for Flute and Orchestra): IV. Hashi’ Hiloha (Sun Thunder)

A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate was born in Norman, Oklahoma in 1968. He has a Master of Music in Piano Performance and Composition from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and he has composed works on commission for numerous American orchestras and ensembles, including the Dale Warland Singers and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

Tracing Mississippi, a concerto for flute and orchestra commissioned by Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra principal flautist Christine Bailey Davis, had its first performance in 2002; “Hashi’ Hiloha (Sun Thunder)” is the final of its four movements.

5. William Grant Still: Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American”: IV. Aspiration (Lento, con risoluzione)

William Grant Still (1895-1978) was born in Mississippi and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He studied music at Oberlin Conservatory; George Whitefield Chadwick and Edgar Varèse were among his composition teachers.

Still completed his first symphony, “Afro-American”, in 1930. He said of this work:

I wanted to prove conclusively that the Negro musical idiom is an important part of the world’s musical culture. That was the reason I decided to create a musical theme in the Blues idiom and develop it into the highest of musical forms — the Symphony.

I wanted, above all, to write music that would be recognizable as being in the idiom employed or recognized, I should say, as that of the American Negro.

In the published score of this symphony, each movement has a corresponding epigraph by Paul Lawrence Dunbar; for the finale, which Still entitled “Aspiration”, these are Dunbar’s verses:

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul.

Thy name is writ on Glory’s scroll

In characters of fire.

High mid the clouds of Fame’s bright sky

Thy banner’s blazoned folds now fly,

And truth shall lift them higher.

You can learn more about Still’s life in this Classical Breakdown episode with Gayle Murchison, a professor of Musicology at William & Mary.

John Banther and I devoted an episode to this symphony:

Bright Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955 and studied music at Shanghai Conservatory before emigrating to the United States in 1982, where he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in music from Columbia University. He has composed music on commission from orchestras, ensembles and artists around the world.

Three Songs for Violoncello and Pipa was commissioned by the White House in 1999 for a state dinner in honor of visiting Chinese premier Zhu Rongji. Pipa virtuoso Wu Man gave that first performance with cellist Yo Yo Ma; in this recording from a 2003 BIS album, she is joined by Nicholas Tzavaras.

7. Ernest Bloch: Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service): III.

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was born in Geneva, Switzerland and studied music in Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1916. Starting in 1920, he was the Musical Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music for the first five years of its existence, and he went on to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of California, Berkeley. Some of his best-known works reflect his Jewish heritage, such as the Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque.

The Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service) is a 1933 choral-orchestral setting in Ashkenazic Hebrew of a liturgy used in Reform Jewish congregations in America. The third movement begins with the “Silent devotion and response” (Psalm 19:14) proceeds to the removal of the Torah scroll from the ark, and concludes with the “Lecho Adonoy” (1 Chronicles 29:11). This 1960 recording, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, features Robert Merrill in the role of the cantor.

8. Quincy Porter: String Quartet No. 4: III. Allegro molto

Quincy Porter (1897-1966) was born in New Haven, Connecticut and studied music at Yale; he was also a student of Ernest Bloch. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Vassar College, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1954. In the 1930s, he spent three years in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship; one of the works he composed there, in 1931, was the fourth of his eight string quartets.

9. Adolphus Hailstork: O Praise the Lord

Adolphus Hailstork III was born in 1941 in New York state. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and David Diamond, and has degrees from the Manhattan School of Music as well as a doctorate in composition from Michigan State. (I greatly enjoyed a recent performance of his cantata I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes by the Choral Arts Society of Washington.)

This performance of his “O Praise the Lord” by the McCullough Chorale is from a 1995 album on the Albany label of world premiere recordings of some of Hailstork’s choral works.

10. Peter Mennin: Symphony No. 3: I. Allegro robusto

Peter Mennin (1923-1983) was born in Erie, Pennsylvania as Peter Mennini, son of Italian immigrants. Howard Hanson was one of his teachers at the Eastman School of Music; his Symphony No. 3 was composed for his doctoral dissertation, and it had its first performance in 1947 by the New York Philharmonic.

11. Tania León: Tumbao

Composer and conductor Tania León was born in Havana, Cuba in 1943 and emigrated to the United States in 1967, earning degrees from New York University. She has been guest conductor with orchestras around the world, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Beethovenhalle. León is a founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and taught at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College for 35 years, where she was named Professor Emerita upon her retirement in 2019. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2021 and was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2022.

Pianist Adam Kent plays a selection of piano works by León on the 2022 album on the Albany label Teclas de mi piano, including “Tumbao”, a work from 1999.

12. Elinor Remick Warren: Requiem: Graduale

Elinor Remick Warren (1900-1991) was born in Los Angeles. She went to New York in 1920 and soon found herself in demand as both composer and pianist. A choral-orchestral setting of Tennyson that would later be published under the title The Legend of King Arthur garnered further recognition for Warren after its Los Angeles premiere in 1940. Her Requiem was composed in 1965.

13. Florence Price: Symphony No. 1 in E minor: IV. Finale. Presto

John Banther had a conversation with Dr. Karen Walwyn about the life of Little Rock, Arkansas native Florence Price (1887-1953) on a Classical Breakdown episode. An alumna of the New England Conservatory, where George Chadwick (one of the so-called “Boston Six” composers) was one of her teachers, she settled in Chicago in 1927. Her Symphony No. 1 in E minor (explored in a Classical Breakdown episode with Nicole Lacroix) won first prize in the 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Awards; the following year, it was played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — probably the first work by a Black woman to be played by a major American orchestra. A new recording of the work by the Chineke! Orchestra has just been released.