Reminiscences & Reflections | Festival of American Music | Made in the USA

Made in the USA is built around three titans of American music: Joan Tower, Michael Gandolfi, and John Harbison — composers whose work has been commissioned and performed by virtually every major American orchestra, from the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic to the Chicago Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, and The Metropolitan Opera. Together they have helped redefine American classical music over the past half century, and this program showcases each at their most compelling.

The evening opens with Ives's The Unanswered Question — as provocative and timely today as when it was written — before launching into an extraordinary triple premiere. Jonah Cohen, a senior at The Juilliard School and a name to watch in American composition, offers a new work written specifically for MCO. Frank Rives, whose decades of dedication to this orchestra have been immeasurable, makes his debut as a composer with a new piece written in celebration of that relationship. And Michael Gandolfi presents a world premiere suite drawn from his larger work Pinocchio's Adventures in Funland, performed here for the very first time anywhere.

After intermission, Tower's exhilarating Petroushskates leads into Gandolfi's suite and Harbison's Songs America Loves to Sing — a magnificent, wide-ranging work that brings the evening to a memorable close.

But that's not all. Gunther Schuller, who almost single-handedly revived ragtime as a serious art form in the 1970s, arranged three gems of the genre — Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, Jelly Roll Morton's Smokehouse Blues, and Eubie Blake's Charleston Rag — and MCO performs all three. And Colin McPhee, one of the first Western composers to fall under the spell of Balinese gamelan music, is represented by his haunting Nocturne, which carries that rich Indonesian influence into the American orchestral tradition.

All of this is brought to life under the baton of John Turner, a young conductor of exceptional promise who has been the driving force behind this concert from the start — curating the program, championing the premieres, and shaping a vision of American music that is entirely his own. We suspect you'll be hearing his name for a long time to come.

World premieres, American masters, ragtime, gamelan-influenced orchestral color — Made in the USA is a concert that could only happen here, and only once.

Info: Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question (1908)
One of the most quietly revolutionary works in the American repertoire, The Unanswered Question sets three musical forces against one another — serene, slowly moving strings, a solo trumpet posing what Ives called "the perennial question of existence," and a quartet of flutes offering increasingly frustrated attempts at an answer. The question is never resolved. Written in 1908 but decades ahead of its time, it remains as mysterious and moving today as ever and makes a perfect gateway into an evening of American music.

Info: Colin McPhee: Nocturne (1958)
Canadian-born but deeply American in spirit, Colin McPhee was among the first Western composers to immerse himself in the music of Bali, spending years on the island in the 1930s studying its gamelan traditions. His Nocturne carries that experience into the chamber music setting — shimmering, hypnotic, and unlike anything else in the Western canon. It is a reminder that American music has always drawn strength from its willingness to listen to the wider world.

Info: Scott Joplin: Maple Leaf Rag / Jelly Roll Morton: Smokehouse Blues / Eubie Blake: Charleston Rag
(arr. Gunther Schuller)
Ragtime was the first truly original American popular music, and these three pieces represent three of its greatest voices. Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag is the genre's most beloved standard; Jelly Roll Morton's Smokehouse Blues carries the music toward jazz; and Eubie Blake's Charleston Rag crackles with the energy that would fuel an entire era of American popular culture. Gunther Schuller — himself one of the great figures of American music — arranged all three with the care and respect they deserve, helping to revive serious interest in ragtime as an art form in the 1970s.

Info: Joan Tower: Petroushskates (1980)
Joan Tower's Petroushskates is exactly what its punning title suggests — a collision of Stravinsky's Petrushka and the exhilaration of figure skating, with Tower's own irrepressible energy thrown in for good measure. Brilliant, witty, and technically demanding, it showcases Tower at her most playful while leaving no doubt about her mastery of the ensemble. It is one of the most purely enjoyable works in the chamber music repertoire.

Info: Michael Gandolfi: Suite from Pinocchio's Adventures in Funland (World Premiere) Michael Gandolfi's Pinocchio's Adventures in Funland is a retelling of Carlo Collodi's beloved story of the manic marionette, brought to life through rich ensemble textures and recurring musical themes that illuminate Dana Bonstrom's vivid adaptation scene by scene. Originally commissioned for young audiences, the work has a freshness and theatricality that delights listeners of any age. Tonight, MCO presents the world premiere of a new suite drawn from the larger work — the first time these selections have been heard in this form, anywhere.

Info: John Harbison: Songs America Loves to Sing (1999)
John Harbison remembers — or imagines he remembers — the family gathered around the piano, singing from an album called Songs America Loves to Sing. That memory, tender and a little melancholy, is the heart of this work. Written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, it sets ten familiar American melodies — Amazing Grace, Careless Love, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, We Shall Overcome, and others — alternating between solos and canons. The tunes are familiar, but Harbison's treatment is anything but simple. We Shall Overcome, rendered in the vocabulary of early music, suggests that "the goals it furthered have not been achieved." Dedicated to his late sister, Songs America Loves to Sing is at once intimate and ambitious, nostalgic and unsentimental — a meditation on memory, family, and what music means to us when we share it with the people we love.

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