American music comes of age

In June, as we present a series of concerts honoring our country’s 250th anniversary, it is clear that the music of our land has come of age. In 1892, near the end of the Chicago Symphony’s opening season, the orchestra played its first all-American program: works born within 250 miles of each other along a narrow slice of New England (John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Frederick Grant, Gleason and Harry Rowe Shelley). Their music was “made according to German models,” a local critic pointed out. “Any idea or orchestral effect that can be considered as distinctively and peculiarly American is not found in them,” he wrote.

What you will hear this month is distinctively American, not because it has a singular instantly identifiable accent or style, but because it reflects the breadth and variety of the landscapes, traditions and peoples of America. There is music from Charles Ives, often called the father of American music, to John Adams, who as his presidential name suggests, is a founding father of a new world of contemporary music that has swept the land. From Jessie Montgomery, born, raised, and trained in New York City, to Kurt Weill, who fled the Nazi takeover of his native Germany to settle in that same city, where the luxury of freedom inspired some of his most successful scores. From Duke Ellington, who wove jazz and symphony together in unexpected harmony, to Wynton Marsalis, who imbues that tradition with unforeseen power and provocation today. From Copland to Bernstein, whose very names bring to mind the music of our open prairies and the urban jungle. There are pieces inspired by “The Star-Spangled Banner” and by Plymouth Rock. There is music as timeless as the singing of Black spirituals and as genre-defying as Chris Thile’s mandolin playing, and there are the indelible words of Abraham Lincoln, still potent after all these years.

The music of America has broadened to encompass the full richness—and the complexity—of our land and our citizenship. The European models are still with us, but there is now a wealth of new music unlike anything being written on the other side of the ocean. Some of the pieces we perform this month have roots as old as our country; some are nearly brand new. That is what these concerts celebrate: an American music that is too diverse to be pigeonholed because it mirrors the dizzying wealth of styles and backstories and ambitions of the composers working here. These programs reflect how far we have come as a land of music and musicians. And in the end, they speak to us about who we are now.