What exactly is American classical music? In crafting their answers, programmers have historically taken one of two approaches: cautious, fragmented efforts or risky, all-in-one merger.
The fragmented strategy might admit that items from jazz composers like Duke Ellington should be included in the mix, but as a separate concert or album, rather than featuring the fully-notated and regularly played works of Gershwin or Bernstein. The merger approach is much less commonly heard. But it existed. In 1976, American pianist Frederic Rzewski gave listeners an inventive blend of two different notated piano pieces by saxophonist and improviser Anthony Braxton—plus a sonata by German-born composer Hanns Eisler and his own “No Place to Go but Around”—into a dazzling recital.
This concept, once experimental, is now one that occasionally embraces the classical mainstream, as on violinist Daniel Hope’s recent album, “America.” The experimenters also still do fusion, as on the new release of the string quartet PUBLIQuartet, ‘What Is American’. A third route — of adopting entirely new music — is demonstrated in yet another recording, violinist Johnny Gandelsman’s three-disc, sprawling “This Is America,” due out July 1.
Hope’s album is proof that the fusion approach isn’t necessarily easy. On his recording, released earlier this year on the Deutsche Grammophon label, he tries out both Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke and “Come Sunday” from Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige”. (Also on the program are pillars of a more closely framed American repertoire, such as works by Bernstein and Copland.)
In the Cooke, Hope’s tone is pleasant enough – if a touch too pale to match the soulfulness of Joy Denalane’s vocals. But the Ellington snippet is a missed opportunity, with an opening shot through the air too lightly.
Please rate this lecture by reference to an Ellington recording from 1958 in which the violinist Ray Nance enjoys the same melodic material for 10 seconds after his entry. There’s a reason you don’t fast forward through sentences; the extra seconds can turn out to mean everything.
On Hope’s album, the best performances come early, when he records a series of Gershwin tunes. Here he invites a trio led by pianist Marcus Roberts to help with improvisations and the swinging American idiom. Their participation inspires a spirited playing by Hope, whose tone dances perky during ‘Fascinating Rhythm’. (He also plays bluesy double-stops over the rhythms of drummer Jason Marsalis towards the end of “Summertime.”)
Nevertheless, the collaboration between Hope, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and the Roberts Trio remains incessantly polite, the latter being noticeably enclosed. It’s a far cry from the energy of a 2003 Berlin Philharmonic performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa, streaming at that ensemble’s Digital Concert Hall, which brought in the Roberts Trio for a bold, push-and-pull reading of Gerswhin’s Concerto in F.
“America” seems to be aware that this could be a problem. The cover shows Hope, dressed in a vest and tuxedo, leaning against a vintage car parked in front of a building whose windows are decorated with portraits of American musical greats. But the artists Photoshopped into those window frames don’t quite match the sound of the album. No passage has the explosive quality of the ecstatic hopping between registers and timbres of saxophonist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy. So what’s he doing in the album cover?
In addition to his own music, Dolphy appeared as a major soloist in Civil Rights-era musical essays by bassist and composer Charles Mingus, most notably in “Original Faubus Fables” and “Meditations on Integration.” But the protest poetry of Dolphy and of John Coltrane — another artist pictured on the cover of “America” — is absent here except for the title of Cooke’s auspicious pop song.
As a result, Musically Hope’s album is not confronted with the shaky state of the union, or recognition of past revolutions within this country’s ever-evolving jazz tradition. The fiery music Coltrane and Dolphy played in 1961 was criticized in some quarters at the time as “anti-jazz” – a version that hasn’t aged well. But while Hope is eager to ignite the fire of American ingenuity on an album cover, in practice he doesn’t want to be seared by it.
The opposite is true for long pieces of Gandelsman’s ‘This Is America’ project, an ambitious set that tries to conquer the national temperature by requesting new solo works from a group of several dozen composers. In his liner notes for the album, the violinist cites a whole host of things as inspiration for his impulse to commission these pieces: the pandemic; police brutality and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor; the more than four million acres of California forests lost to wildfires in 2020; unemployment; “vicious election cycle rhetoric.”
Many of the composers responded to Gandelsman’s prompt with a similar sense of overwhelming fear and sadness. Reasonable. But as a listening experience, the nearly four-hour program could have used more works such as “Sahra be Wyckoff,” by Syrian-born clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh. Written for a time when it was difficult for friends and artistic collaborators to get together, it recalls a more joyful past of Brooklyn jam sessions. Gandelsman’s intoxicating performance sent me back to Azmeh’s impressive 2021 album ‘Flow’, recorded with Germany’s NDR Bigband. That set is another example of the wide mutability of American energies – with Ellingtonian orchestration merging with Middle Eastern melodic modes.
Otherwise, Gandelsman’s pieces took a trend toward gloomy moods and subjects — including a memorial to a dead friend and multiple meditations on Civil War. And some pieces reflect composers’ long-established preoccupations. So when Tyshawn Sorey offers the contemplative (and sometimes unforgiving) “For Courtney Bryan,” the miniature can serve as a small but important addition to the composer’s rapidly expanding catalog of prismatic tributes to his musical contemporaries. But “For Courtney Bryan” is only slightly involved in Gandelsman’s expressed hope that the commissions “reflect in some way on the time we all went through.” (For Sorey’s more specific thoughts on our moment, you could turn to his searing “Save the Boys,” from last year.)
Yet it is all played precisely; Gandelsman is tuned to the precise nature of each artist and tailors his sound to each artist. The second disc offers a rush of compositional contrast and interpretive effort. There you’ll find Angélica Negrón’s dreamy ode to childhood stargazing (“A Través del Manto Luminoso”), where Gandelsman’s whistling, direct sound blends perfectly with the electronic backing track.
Ebun Oguntola’s somber yet mysterious “Reflections” spurs Gandelsman into contrasts of arc pressure, signifying unpredictable turns of a person’s mind. On Tomeka Reid’s singing and then virtuoso “Rhapsody”, his dynamic shifts are more fluid in nature – and quietly impressive. And Gandelsman adds a charming, quite associative quality to his performance of Terry Riley’s episodic “Barbary Coast 1955.”
The kaleidoscopic invention in those works carries over into PUBLIQuartet’s “What Is American,” my favorite classic album of the year so far. It features winning arrangements by Dvorak, as well as Tina Turner’s “Black Coffee” and the Ornette Coleman tunes “Law Years” and “Street Woman”. There is a head nodding performance by Vijay Iyer’s string quartet “Dig the Say” (himself inspired by James Brown).
And there’s a new string quartet, “CARDS 11.11.20,” by Roscoe Mitchell – the composer-saxophonist who rose to prominence in the 1960s, alongside Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Like other works in Mitchell’s “Cards” series, this through-composed effort invites improvisation (allowing musicians to shake fragments of the score at some point in the performance); the PUBLIQuartet players feel at home in this quintessentially American challenge.
Among those and other works are the quartet’s broken recitations of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s obscure fifth verse on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Amid the Civil War, this poet—and the father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. – “the traitor who dares to pollute / The flag of her stars and the page of her story!” (Think of that in the context of the Jan. 6 rioter who carried the Confederate flag in the United States Capitol building, and was recently convicted of one felony and four violations.)
Never overcrowded, “What Is American” packs fun, eclecticism and civic engagement within the length of a single CD. The album’s ability to weave together multiple traditions reaches an early zenith in the radical yet recognizable reworking of Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 12 – Nicknamed the “American” in part because of his affection for and inspiration from black American musicians such as Harry Burleigh (as well as Native American melody).
We have dozens of pristine, score-accurate renditions of this warhorse; the PUBLIQuartet players have rightly felt that it can withstand a bit of reinvention. Their performance represents, they notice, “improvisations” at work. They practically draw and share the first and second themes of the opening movement, introducing or fleshing them out with scratchy, rough-hewn accents.
Before the movement closes on these themes, the players give us a chilling moment. After completing their version of the development, they perform a tempo drop before collectively improvising in a blues mode with broad appeal.
Seconds later, when the group returns to Dvorak’s own American-inspired sound, other albums with similar ambitions lack a fresh idea: a suggestion that group dynamics, like individual interpretations, are essential to American music. It won’t solve the country’s problems, but as the definitions of today’s American mind go, it’s the recording I’ll be playing for loved ones coming on July 4.
