A Significant Symphonic Heritage

Just want to call your attention to the American Composers Festival in Orange County California. The Pacific Symphony is working hard to put American Composers on the map with an orchestral festival devoted to the music of this nation. This is largely the doing of Carl St.Clair and his passion for American Music AND a community that seeks to explore. I am a volunteer with this festival and believe in its existence even though I may not always like the music. I love the fact that we do this every year and I am only disappointed that more people don't know about it. I hope you will add Pacific to your list of champions of the music and the orchestras that keep it in our ears!

Also,when Neeme Jarvi
was music director
with the Detroit
symphony,he championed and recorded American music by the likes of Chadwick etc,and even
championed music by
African-American composers such as William
Grant Still.No doubt
Leonard Slatkin will
continue to champion
American music there.
And with all the new music being performed
by our own composers,
American music is not exactly languishing
in America.

Along with language, i believe there is much in the way a land vibrates. I know how intangible this is.
It is something i have 'experienced' and might in turn effect the language.
Music sounds best in it origins. Some German music made so much more sense to me there.
In Australia, the orchestras are required to play a certain amount of Australian works. I guess if one can not get the funds to play something, one must blackmail to take away funds in general.
Possibly American Orchestral music needs such a system of blackmail.

I couldn't agree more, and would submit that American orchestras have perhaps an even greater treasure trove of works from which to draw than most of the countries you've mentioned. Especially if you were to include emigre composers who wrote a lot their music in America (Schonberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith, Korngold, Rozsa, Weill, Varese, Dahl, etc.)

I think the fundamental problem we now have - and one which affects more than just programming of American music - is the "I like what I know" approach to programming. Orchestras don't seem willing to program even works that people are likely to enjoy, so great seems to be their fear of playing something people don't already know. And not without justification; in recent years NY Times reviews have noted audiences walking out ahead of such pieces as Goldmark's Rustic Wedding Symphony or Nielsen's 4th - neither a piece that should cause the listener any distress. Or several years ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra proudly announced that they would perform a season of all 20th-century works (not all that adventurous when you think about who was alive and composing in 1901); but the announcement of it provoked, as I recall, a rather negative backlash from their subscribers worried about missing their Beethoven and Brahms and visions of all-Schonberg programs dancing in their heads.

But I think many orchestras do a poor selling job. A few years ago the NY Philharmonic did a multi-year "American Classics" program. A great idea by an orchestra with an admirable legacy in this area. But aside from an occasionally adventurous piece like Lukas Foss' "Time Cycle," most of their programs sandwiched something relatively safe like Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 with a Beethoven symphony and some warhorse concerto. All of which just sent a message that the featured "American Classic" work was something to be feared or tolerated, rather than welcomed.