Program Notes: Americans and Paris

JANUARY 6 & 8

AMERICANS AND PARIS FRIDAY January 6, 2017 – 8:00pm SUNDAY January 8, 2017 – 2:00pm JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT

conductor Andrew Gourlay piano Inon Barnatan

All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall This concert is made possible through the generosity of Phyllis and Daniel Epstein.

PROGRAM AARON COPLAND

Suite from Billy the Kid

The Open Prairie

Street in a Frontier Town

Mexican Dance and Finale

Card Game at Night

Running Gun Battle

Celebration on Billy's Capture

Billy's Death

The Open Prairie Again

AARON COPLAND

Piano Concerto

Andante sostenuto

Molto moderato (molto rubato) - Allegro assai

Inon Barnatan, piano

INTERMISSION ANDREW NORMAN

GEORGE GERSHWIN / Rev. F. Campbell-Watson

Suspend

Inon Barnatan, piano An American in Paris

The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and forty-five minutes.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

AMERICANS AND PARIS - JANUARY 6 & 8

Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Sinfonietta and Opera North, and he toured South America and Europe as a member of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester under Claudio Abbado. n

ANDREW GOURLAY, CONDUCTOR

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orn in Jamaica, with Russian ancestry, ANDREW GOURLAY grew up in the Bahamas, Philippines, Japan and England. A trombonist and pianist by training, he studied conducting at the Royal College of Music, where he prepared Bruckner symphonies for Bernard Haitink and Mozart symphonies for Sir Roger Norrington. He was selected by Gramophone magazine as their “One to Watch,” and by BBC Music Magazine as their “Rising Star: Great Artists of Tomorrow.”

Mr. Gourlay became Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y León in Valladolid in January 2016, where he had been Principal Guest Conductor since the 2014-15 season. He won First Prize at the 2010 Cadaques International Conducting Competition, securing concerts with 29 orchestras around the world. For the next two years he was assistant conductor to Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé Orchestra.

Recent and future guest engagements include conducting the San Diego Symphony, Philharmonia, the BBC orchestras, RLPO, Hallé, CBSO, Opera North, RTÉ Symphony, Ulster Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony, Australian Youth Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonia, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Royal Flemish Philharmonic, Stavanger Symphony, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Orquesta Sinfonica de Chile, numerous major orchestras throughout Spain and the London Sinfonietta at the BBC Proms.

INON BARNATAN, PIANO

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elebrated for his poetic sensibility, probing intellect, and consummate artistry, Israeli pianist INON BARNATAN is embarking on his third and final season as the inaugural Artist-inAssociation of the New York Philharmonic, appearing as soloist in subscription concerts, taking part in regular chamber performances and acting as ambassador for the orchestra.

This summer Mr. Barnatan makes a host of high-profile festival appearances, including the Seattle, Santa Fe, Delft and Aspen Festivals, all capped by a solo recital marking his Mostly Mozart debut. In the 2016-17 season he debuts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Jesús López-Cobos, the Baltimore Symphony under Vasily Petrenko and the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot. He returns to the New York Philharmonic under Manfred Honeck, and embarks on three

Operatic engagements have included the UK premiere of Luca Francesoni’s Quartett for the Royal Opera House. He has conducted Rusalka and La Tragédie de Carmen for English Touring Opera and The Marriage of Figaro at the Benjamin Britten International Opera School. He has worked as Assistant Conductor for Glyndebourne Festival Opera. In 2015 he conducted Tippett’s The Ice Break to great critical acclaim in a new production by Graham Vick for Birmingham Opera Company and the CBSO. Andrew Gourlay has conducted recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra and Irish Chamber Orchestra. A professional trombonist until his mid-twenties, he played with the Philharmonia, Hallé, BBC S AN DI EG O SYMPHO NY O RCHEST RA 2016- 17 SEA SO N J A N UA RY 2017

tours: of the U.S. with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of Europe with his frequent recital partner Alisa Weilerstein and of the U.S. again performing a trio program with Weilerstein and clarinetist Anthony McGill, including a concert at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Other highlights include concerto performances in Japan, Hong Kong and Australia, the complete Beethoven concerto cycle in Marseille and several concerts at London's Wigmore Hall.

A recipient of both the Avery Fisher Career Grant and Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, Mr. Barnatan has performed extensively with many of the world’s foremost orchestras, including those of Cleveland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; the Royal Stockholm Symphony Orchestra; and the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon. He has worked with such distinguished conductors as Gustavo Dudamel, Michael Tilson Thomas, James Gaffigan, Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher, Thomas Søndergård, David Robertson, Edo de Waart, Pinchas Zukerman and Jaap van Zweden. Passionate about contemporary music, in recent seasons the pianist has premiered new pieces composed for him by Matthias Pintscher, Sebastian Currier and Avner Dorman.

“A born Schubertian” (Gramophone), Inon Barnatan’s critically acclaimed discography includes Avie and Bridge recordings of the Austrian composer’s solo piano works, as well as Darknesse Visible, which scored a coveted place on the New York Times’ “Best of 2012” list. Last October the pianist released Rachmaninov & Chopin: Cello Sonatas on Decca Classics with Weilerstein, which earned rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. n

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NDREW NORMAN (b. 1979) is a Los Angeles-based composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music.

Concert Sponsor Spotlight

PHYLLIS AND DANIEL EPSTEIN

Mr. Norman’s work draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and notational practices from both the avant-garde and classical traditions. He is increasingly interested in story-telling in music, and specifically in the ways non-linear, narrative-scrambling techniques from other time-based media like movies and video games DANmight and PHYLLIS have been intersect EPSTEIN with traditional symphonic involved with San Diegooften Symphony for and forms.

Histhe distinctive, fragmented the last several years.voice Both has havebeen served on in The highly energetic cited New York Times its “daring juxtapositions the board during thisfor time. and dazzling colors,” in The Boston Globe for its Dan “staggering and Phyllis imagination” are sponsoring both the Times and in the L.A. Americans Paris andspirit American Riffs and for itsand “audacious” and “Chaplinesque” Rhapsodies wit. concerts.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

AMERICANS AND PARIS - JANUARY 6 & 8

ANDREW NORMAN, COMPOSER

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NDREW NORMAN (b. 1979) is a Los Angeles-based composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music.

Mr. Norman’s work draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and notational practices from both the avant-garde and classical traditions. He is increasingly interested in story-telling in music, and specifically in the ways non-linear, narrative-scrambling techniques from other

time-based media like movies and video games might intersect with traditional symphonic forms. His distinctive, often fragmented and highly energetic voice has been cited in The New York Times for its “daring juxtapositions and dazzling colors,” in The Boston Globe for its “staggering imagination” and in the L.A. Times for its “audacious” spirit and “Chaplinesque” wit.

Mr. Norman’s symphonic works have been performed by leading ensembles worldwide, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, the BBC, Saint Louis, Seattle and Melbourne Symphonies, the Orpheus, Saint Paul and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestras, the Tonhalle Orchester, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France and many others. His

music has been championed by some of the classical music’s eminent conductors, including John Adams, Marin Alsop, Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Rattle and David Robertson.

In recent seasons, Mr. Norman’s chamber music has been featured at the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Wordless Music Series, the CONTACT! series, the Ojai Festival, the MATA Festival, the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the Green Umbrella series, the Monday Evening Concerts and the Aspen Music Festival. In May of 2010, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble presented a portrait concert of Andrew’s music entitled “Melting Architecture.”

Mr. Norman was recently named Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year. He is the recipient of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Continues on pg. 38

ABOUT THE MUSIC CO P L AND AND G ER SHWIN Aaron Copland and George Gershwin were the most popular American composers of the first half of the twentieth century, and they had similar careers. Both grew up in New York City, both were excellent pianists, both studied with Rubin Goldmark, both made use of jazz, both lived in Hollywood for a time and wrote for movies, and both became very successful. They should have become good friends and colleagues. But they didn’t. Not out of animosity – they admired each other’s music, and Copland performed and conducted Gershwin’s music – but Copland reported that when the two of them finally met, they had “nothing to say to each other.” It was mutual admiration, but from a distance. n

Suite from Billy the Kid AA R O N CO PL A ND Born November 14, 1900, Brooklyn Died December 2, 1990, North Tarrytown, New York Early in 1938 Aaron Copland was approached

by Lincoln Kirstein, director of the Ballet Caravan, who wished to commission a ballet based on the life of Billy the Kid. While Copland was happy to write a ballet score, he was not drawn to this subject, and he felt a particular aversion to cowboy music.

He was frank about this in a note written for the eventual premiere of Billy the Kid: “I have never been particularly impressed with the musical beauties of the cowboy song as such. The words are usually delightful and P 10 PE RFORMA NCES MAGA Z IN E

the manner of singing needs no praise from me. But neither the words nor the delivery are of much use in a purely orchestral ballet score, so I was left with the tunes themselves, which I repeat, are often less than exciting. As far as I was concerned, this ballet could be written without benefit of the poverty-stricken tunes Billy himself must have known.”

Kirstein assured Copland that he need not use actual cowboy tunes in the ballet, but as the composer left to spend the summer of 1938 in Paris, Kirstein gave him several collections of cowboy songs to look over.

As Copland settled down to work on the score, a strange thing happened: “Perhaps there is something different about a cowboy song in Paris. But whatever the reason may have been, it wasn’t very long before I found myself hopelessly involved in expanding, contracting, rearranging and superimposing cowboy tunes on the rue de Rennes in Paris.”

Copland’s symphonic transformation of these cowboy tunes is one of the triumphs of Billy the Kid. He never quotes directly but instead uses theme-shapes, intervals and bits of rhythm from them; we sense their origins and distinctive flavor without ever hearing the tunes in their original form. Copland drew on a number of favorite cowboy songs but did not use the most famous of them, “Home on the Range” – “I had to draw the line somewhere,” he noted wryly.

Copland began work on Billy the Kid in Paris in June 1938 and completed it in September at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

The Ballet Caravan gave the premiere

(accompanied by two pianos) in Chicago on October 6, 1938; the premiere with orchestra took place in New York on May 24, 1939. The ballet proved an instant success, and Copland quickly arranged an orchestral suite from its music, preserving about two-thirds of the original ballet score. This was first performed on November 9, 1940, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of William Steinberg, and it has remained (deservedly) one of Copland’s most popular works.

The choice of subject for the ballet may seem curious. It is a quirk of the human imagination that the psychopathic murderers of one century are sometimes transformed into the folk-heroes of the next, and this was the case with Billy the Kid, who once bragged that he had killed a man for each of his twenty-one years, “not counting Indians.” Kirstein drew his story from Walter Noble Burns’ The Saga of Billy the Kid, a revisionist history that transformed Billy (by contemporary accounts hot-tempered, buck-toothed, and dim-witted) into victim, gentleman and quintessential outsider. It was as if Charles Starkweather had been transformed into James Dean, and the canonization of Billy remains a matter of sharp dispute among historians of the Old West.

The figure of the outsider, however, is an American archetype, and choreographer Eugene Loring (who danced the part at the premiere) worked out a scenario that made Billy a misunderstood youth and rebel against a corrupt society. The ballet begins on the open prairie, and in a lively frontier

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AMERICANS AND PARIS - JANUARY 6 & 8 town we meet Billy at age twelve. In this first scene the boy murders the man who killed his mother. The events of the rest of his brief life are truncated into a few wellfocused episodes: Billy participates in a card game at night on the plains but is accused of cheating; he is pursued by Pat Garrett and imprisoned after a gunfight; he escapes into the desert and rests with his girl, but now the posse catches up to him and kills him.

The ballet concludes, as it began, on the vast prairie.

Copland’s marking for the beginning of The Open Prairie is Lento maestoso, and this music is in fact slow and majestic: the bare fifths of the woodwinds and strings suggest great space, and the steady tread of two French horns marks the appearance of humans within this vastness. This grows to a climax, and suddenly we are in a frontier town, full of dizzy human energy. Copland’s awareness of cowboy songs shows up here: he quotes “Old Grandad,” “Whoopee-Ti-Yi-Yo” and “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and a solo trumpet memorably performs a Mexican jarabe.

The section comes to its conclusion on an extended treatment of “Old Paint,” which finally rises to an aggressive climax. A reprise of the opening prairie music leads to the Card Game at Night – a nocturne for woodwinds, trumpet, and strings – and this proceeds directly into the Gun Battle, with its booming drums and spatters of gunfire. Celebration depicts the town’s relief at Billy’s capture: Loring had encouraged Copland to include a “macabre polka” as part of the ballet, and this was Copland’s response. Danced by “Cowboys and Gun-Girls,” this Celebration is built on dotted rhythms and the sound of a honky-tonk piano, but what gives this music its “macabre” dimension is its bi-tonality: Copland sets the dance-tune in C Major and its accompaniment in C-sharp Major.

For the orchestral suite, Copland made a large cut at this point, removing the music that depicts Billy’s escape, his betrayal, his dance with his Mexican sweetheart and his confrontation with Pat Garrett. This makes a more concise suite, but the Waltz, danced as a pas de deux by Billy and his sweetheart, is wonderful music, and its exclusion from the suite is unfortunate. The suite resumes at just the point Billy is dying – his final breaths are heard in the quasi tremolando solo violin.

In the suite, Copland moves directly from Billy’s death to a reprise of the music for The Open Prairie that began the ballet, and Billy the Kid concludes out under the open sky of the vast prairies.

Copland’s Billy the Kid might profitably be compared with another evocation of the

American West that appeared at exactly the same moment, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). That classic film not only introduced John Wayne but managed to create virtually every stereotype of the western: the soiled dove, the crooked banker, the drunken doctor, the last-second rescue by the cavalry, and so on. It became a feeding-ground for every subsequent western. In a similar way, Copland’s score for Billy the Kid set the gold standard for music about the West. Its epic sense of space, use of cowboy tunes and concise evocation of a raw frontier town, honky-tonk revelry, gunfights and the lonely hero have become part of the imagination of every subsequent composer who writes music about the American West. n

Piano Concerto AARON CO PLA N D It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who nicknamed the twenties “The Jazz Age,” and in that decade jazz moved into the mainstream of American life with musicians like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington as well as groups like Paul Whiteman’s band, all often headlining in the clubs of Chicago and New York. Jazz quickly began to appear in “classical” music, and composers as diverse as Debussy, Stravinsky, Krenek, Martinů and others incorporated some of its techniques into their own works. In the mid-Twenties, George Gershwin composed two magnificent works that seemed to bridge the worlds of classical music and jazz: Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the Piano Concerto in F (1925).

Young composers in search of something authentically “American” began to turn to jazz, and in these years Aaron Copland felt that pull, particularly in his Music for the Theatre, premiered by Serge Koussevitzky in 1925. When Koussevitzky asked Copland for another piece, he suggested: “If you write a piano concerto, you can play it yourself.”

Copland said “that temptation was too great to pass up,” and he set to work late in the summer of 1926, which he spent in a village in southern France. Copland returned to the United States and completed the score at the end of November, and he was indeed the piano soloist when Koussevitzky led the premiere in Boston on January 28, 1927.

The reviews were vitriolic, almost sulphurous.

The Boston Herald: “We found little to attract, little to admire, much to repel.” The Boston Evening Transcript: “The Copland Piano Concerto is a harrowing horror from beginning to end…There is nothing in it that resembles music except as it contains

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noise.” The New York Telegram described the concerto as “gargantuan dance movements as a herd of elephants engaged in jungle rivalry of the Charleston and dances further south.”

It is hard to imagine how music this youthful and fun could have produced reactions like those that greeted its premiere; nearly a century later, we are more apt to hear it not as a monster but rather as a pleasing memory of that dynamic decade.

Copland’s Piano Concerto is concise. It is in two movements that span only about 18 minutes, and the composer has left a useful description: “The Concerto is to be played without interruption, but it is actually written in two contrasting sections, linked together thematically. The first is slow and lyrical; the second fast and rhythmic. Two basic jazz moods are incorporated in each section – the slow blues and the snappy number.” Copland did not regard the piece as a traditional concerto, but as something quite different: “The piano is as the main character in a play, carrying on a dialogue with the orchestra and conversing with the other instruments.”

The opening “blues” movement begins with a three-note brass fanfare that will return in many forms throughout the concerto.

The solo piano makes its entrance on those same three notes and then leads the way through this varied movement, which is built on syncopated rhythms and shifting meters.

Piano alone opens the second movement with a spiky solo that swings attractively (and which bears some connection to the opening fanfare). Into this “symphonic” movement Copland from time to time will sneak in a small jazz band consisting of soprano sax, piccolo, E-flat clarinet, trumpet, trombones and drums, and during these interludes we seem to have moved from the concert hall into a smoky club. Near the end, Copland brings back the opening fanfare in all its power before concluding on a vigorous three-octave rush up the scale.

After the angry reactions at its premiere, the Piano Concerto pretty much dropped out of sight for two decades, and when it was revived in New York after the war, it found much friendlier audiences: one reviewer then called it “a relic of Le Jazz Hot,” while another described it as “the best roar from the roaring twenties.” After writing this music, Copland looked in new directions: “With the Concerto I felt I had done all I could with the idiom, considering its limited emotional scope. True, it was an easy way to be American in musical terms, but all American music could not possibly be confined to two dominant jazz moods – the P E R FOR M AN C E S M AGAZ I NE P11

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AMERICANS AND PARIS - JANUARY 6 & 8 blues and the snappy number.”

NOTE: Those interested in this music should know that – despite its unfamiliarity – the Copland Piano Concerto has had a number of good recordings. Two are particularly notable: a 1964 performance with the composer at the piano and Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic and another – made in 1961 – with Earl Wild at the keyboard and the composer conducting the Symphony of the Air. n

Suspend A NDR EW NO R MA N Born October 31, 1979, Grand Rapids, Michigan Program Note provided by the composer: Suspend is a 20 minute fantasy for piano and orchestra. It began, at the behest of Emanuel Ax, as an exploration of two melodic fragments, F-A-E (frei aber einsam, free but lonely) and F-A-F (frei aber froh, free but happy), that were significant to Johannes Brahms. From there it developed into an extended rumination on the ideas of freedom and solitude, a dream-like journey inspired by the creative, conflicted, lonely spirit of Brahms and the ever-present tensions in his (and my) life and music between spontaneity and control, sentiment and structure, indulgence and restraint.

Like many of its forebears in the long tradition of keyboard fantasies, Suspend is intended to sound as if it is being made up on the spot, a single meandering but unbroken thread of thought spun out by the pianist from beginning to end. The piece follows a simple scenario: the pianist – perhaps a solitary, Brahms-like figure – sits down at the keyboard and slowly begins to improvise. At first the sounds exist only in the pianist’s own mind, but little by little they become real to the rest of us. The pianist very gradually imagines an orchestra into existence, and over the course of many minutes that imaginary orchestra assumes its own voice and identity, transforming from a shadow, a resonance, an echo of the piano into a

powerful and distinct musical entity that threatens, at the work’s climax, to swallow up the pianist. The piece ends with a coda in which the pianist freely meditates on the F-A-F motive and the orchestra, player by player, is released into a world of free, uncoordinated playing.

Suspend was premiered by Emanuel Ax, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on May 1 and 3, 2014, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California. n

An American in Paris GEORGE GE R S H WI N Born September 28, 1898, Brooklyn Died July 11, 1937, Beverly Hills The acclaim that greeted Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the Concerto in F (1925) made Gershwin more anxious to be taken seriously as the composer of “concert” music, and he resolved to write a work for orchestra alone, without the starring role for piano that had helped make the earlier two works so popular. The composition of this music took place in the spring of 1928, when Gershwin, his sister Frances, his brother Ira and Ira’s wife Leonore took an extended family vacation to Paris. Happily ensconced in the Hotel Majestic, Gershwin composed what he called a “Tone Poem for Orchestra” – a musical portrait of an American visitor to the City of Light – between March and June 1928. It was first performed by Walter Damrosch and the New York Philharmonic on December 13 of that year.

This is fun music, and from the moment of that premiere it has always been one of Gershwin’s most popular scores, winning audiences over with its great tunes, breezy charm and Gershwin’s obvious affection for Paris. Musically, An American in Paris is a series of impressions strung together with great skill. Gershwin – anxious to insist on his abilities as a classical composer – tried to argue that the piece was in sonata-form, and he pointed to such general areas as exposition, development and recapitulation.

But such arguments protest too much. It is

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist Although Robert Shaw conducted a couple of excerpts from Billy the Kid, in the summer of 1957, the wonderful Suite by Copland was given its first complete performance here under Morton Gould in 1969. It has been programmed here six more times since then, including a performance conducted by the composer in the 1978-79 season. Murry Sidlin led the most recent performance

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far better to take An American in Paris as a set of polished episodes – a collection of sunny postcards from Paris – than to search too rigorously for resemblances to classical forms.

For the New York premiere, Gershwin and Deems Taylor prepared elaborate program notes, explaining what was “happening” at each moment in the music. These were probably written with tongue slightly in cheek (in fact Gershwin had made sketches for this piece several years before going to Paris), and they should not be taken too seriously. But it is worth noting that Gershwin structured the music around the idea of an American walking through the streets of Paris, and he included three of what he called “walking themes.” That program note describes the very beginning: “You are to imagine, then, an American visiting Paris, swinging down the Champs-Elysées on a mild, sunny morning in May or June. Being what he is, he starts without preliminaries and is off at full speed at once to the tune of The First Walking Theme, a straightforward diatonic air designed to convey an impression of Gallic freedom and gaiety.”

Along his way come piquant moments: a snatch of a Parisian popular song in the trombones and the strident squawk of Paris taxi horns. (Gershwin had four of these imported for the premiere in New York.) One moment – Gershwin called it “an unhallowed episode” – is rarely mentioned: the American is approached by a streetwalker, who bats her eyes at him seductively in a violin solo marked espressivo. Our hero wavers briefly, then makes his escape on one of the walking tunes. At about the mid-point comes the famous “blues” section, introduced by solo trumpet: the American is feeling homesick, and his nostalgia takes the form of this distinctively American music. Matters are rescued by the sudden intrusion of a pair of trumpets that come sailing in with a snappy Charleston tune. The cheerful final section reprises the various “walking” themes, and An American in Paris dances to its close on a great rush of happy energy. n PROGRAM NOTES BY ERIC BROMBERGER

by this orchestra in the 1992-93 season. Two pieces on this program are being given their first performances in San Diego by this orchestra. These are Norman's Suspend Piano Concerto and the Piano Concerto by Aaron Copland. In contrast, Gershwin's brilliant and very popular tone poem, An American in Paris, has been presented at these concerts ten times since Fabien Sevitzky conducted it during the summer of 1952. Jahja Ling led it here most recently during the 2013-14 season, when he also took it with him to play it during the orchestra's China Friendship Tour.

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CONTEMPORARY MATTERS:

A Few Thoughts on “Our American Music”

by James Chute Who are we?

It’s a question we’ve all been struggling with this election season, and in the days, months and years ahead, it’s an issue certain to gain in urgency and relevance.

Are we inclusive or exclusive? Multicultural or nationalistic? Global or parochial? Or maybe it’s not that simple.

Rather than checking with the pollsters or re-analyzing the election results, perhaps we can find out something about ourselves from contemporary American composers. They’ve been dealing with that question for years. And their outlook is relatively clear: we’re inclusive, multicultural and global in our perspective.

Their music is informed by everything from pop culture to ethnic cultures. And it doesn’t have to sound “American” to be American.

It’s open to a world of possibilities.

Consider the Jan. 6 opening program of the San Diego Symphony’s month-long “Our American Music” celebration. It features the San Diego premiere of Andrew Norman’s new piano concerto, Suspend (with pianist Inon Barnatan). Norman was named Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year, and orchestras around the globe have performed his work. He has the usual distinguished academic credentials: degrees from USC and Yale, and after a brief sojourn in Brooklyn, he’s back in Los Angeles on the faculty of USC. Norman’s influences range from Star Wars with its soundtrack

by John Williams (whose music will be showcased on the Jan. 21 concert with violinist Itzhak Perlman) to video games and other digital media. “How we pause videos when we’re watching YouTube,” Norman said in an interview with the New York Times regarding inspirations for Suspend. “How we manipulate stuff on our computers that have to do with cutting things up and pausing them and freezing them.”

Suspend, however, is also influenced by the music of Johannes Brahms. It was commissioned by pianist Emanuel Ax and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and it premiered last year. On his website, Norman calls it an “extended rumination on the ideas of freedom and solitude, a dream-like journey inspired by the creative, conflicted, lonely spirit of Brahms and the ever-present tensions in his (and my) life and music between spontaneity and control, sentiment and structure, indulgence and restraint.”

You could say Brahms’ “creative, conflicted, lonely spirit” has haunted numerous American composers of a much earlier generation. In 1873, when composer John Knowles Paine became the first university music professor in the U.S. by accepting a faculty position at Harvard, Paine’s unyielding allegiance was to the classical style embodied by Brahms and other European composers. Tellingly, it took a European composer, Antonín Dvořák, visiting America a decade later, to challenge American composers to find an American voice.

Charles Ives is widely considered the godfather of American music and the first in a line of experimental American composers that continues into the 21st century. For Ives, that American voice was found in revival hymns, minstrel songs, spirituals and popular tunes.

Those elements are all evident in Ives’ Symphony No. 2, written at the beginning of the 20th century (and the centerpiece of the Jan. 28 “Beyond the Score” presentation). But also there is

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Brahms, whose ghost Ives apparently exorcised by juxtaposing it with a tune like Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” or the patriotic anthem “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”

While some like-minded composers, including Henry Cowell, whose “Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2” is on the Jan. 27 and 29 programs, embraced Ives’ experimental ethos, audiences and orchestras largely did not. American symphony orchestras were founded on the model of their European counterparts and were dominated by European maestros like Arturo Toscanini, who gave his audiences a steady diet of European masters like Brahms.

It took a half-century before Leonard Bernstein premiered Ives’ Symphony No. 2 with the New York Philharmonic in 1951.

Perhaps because of his long-standing differences with the musical establishment, Ives refused to attend the work’s premiere, although he heard it (along with the audience’s enthusiastic response) on a radio broadcast.

Aaron Copland also accepted the challenge and included jazz in his 1926 Piano Concerto (performed Jan. 6 and 8) and folk tunes in his ballet scores of the ‘30s and ‘40s, including Billy the Kid (also Jan. 6 and 8) and Appalachian Spring (performed here by Art of Élan Jan. 10). More than the tunes, however, make Copland’s music American. It has a generosity of spirit and a sense of optimism, also apparent in Ives’ music, that seemed part of our national character.

By the late ‘40s and 1950s, however, with the influx of emigre composers into the U.S. and the dominance of atonality, Copland came under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, as did the academic musical establishment. As American composers moved forward with an attitude characterized by composer Milton Babbitt’s infamous aphorism “Who cares if you listen?,” audiences and symphony orchestras understandably looked backward.

Among composers there were exceptions, such as Bernstein, but his most-performed music, including West Side Story (Jan. 20 and 22) was written for other mediums, including film, where classical music found its largest audience and some composers found a home. Even Igor Stravinsky dabbled with film composing: his Symphony in Three Movements (on the Jan. 20 and 22 programs) contains fragments originally intended for a film score.

It took composers of John Adams’ generation (his City Noir is also on the Jan. 20/22 programs), born in the ‘40s and educated in the ‘60s, to extract themselves from serialism and reconnect with audiences, who after decades of institutional indifference to contemporary music are understandably skeptical.

There’s been a return to music’s basic elements: tunes, tonality and a rhythmic pulse. But as Norman and others have shown, those aren’t requirements; they are options. There are countless ways to make music and to connect with listeners, whether by invoking Brahms, or as composer Eve Beglarian does in “I will not be sad in this world,” by using a melody from an 18th-century Armenian troubadour (on the Jan. 10 Art of Élan program).

If that openness to a wide range of possibilities is arguably the defining characteristic of American music at the moment, what does that say about us? What does that tell us about who we aspire to be? n

As a critic, writer and editor, James Chute has covered the arts for nearly four decades. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, he served as music critic for The Cincinnati Post, The Milwaukee Journal and The Orange County Register before joining The San Diego Union in 1990, later evolving to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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