![\"\"](\"https:\/\/webfiles-pb.s3.amazonaws.com\/images\/AmericanRootsTitle.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Beginning in the 1860s, the conductor Theodore Thomas \u2013 a symphonic Johnny Appleseed \u2013 began touring the entire United States with his Thomas Orchestra. His credo was: \u201cA symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community.\u201d And in cities large and small, it did.<\/p>\n
Today, the American orchestra is no longer the civic bulwark it once was. There are exceptions. I would say that the Chicago Symphony is one. That\u2019s partly because Thomas himself was the founding music director, in 1891; and because he was succeeded by his assistant, Frederick Stock, through 1942. That is: For half a century, the Chicago Symphony had only two primary conductors, both German-born. It also happens to be the only American orchestra whose founding music director was a major conductor. And so it retains a central place in Chicago\u2019s identity. It also retains an anchoring Germanic identity, Riccardo Muti notwithstanding.<\/p>\n
But the American orchestra that most shows the culture of the community can only be the South Dakota Symphony. As I have previously written in this space,<\/strong><\/a> it is our most exceptional orchestra. I am just back from a week in South Dakota, and my impressions have only deepened.<\/p>\n The occasion was a third Music Unwound<\/strong><\/a> festival, funded by the NEH. Previously, we undertook \u201cDvorak and America\u201d (bringing the New World<\/em> Symphony to an Indian reservation) and \u201cCopland and Mexico\u201d<\/strong> <\/a>(for which the musicians lustily sang Copland\u2019s Communist workers\u2019 song \u201cInto the Streets May First!\u201d \u2013 even though several had scurrilously threatened to \u00a0\u201ctake a knee\u201d). This season\u2019s Music Unwound immersion experience was \u201cAmerican Roots.\u201d It comprised two subscription concerts, three young people\u2019s concerts (filmed by South Dakota public TV), ancillary concerts and a master class at two universities, and the participation of two middle school Social Studies classes (with sixty seventh graders reading my young readers book Dvorak and America<\/em>). The total attendance was something like 6,000, and covered a geographic radius of 150 miles.<\/p>\n The SDSO subscription audience is by far the most diversified in age I have ever encountered at a professional symphonic concert (and I have been around). And yet the programing is bold. The main work on \u201cAmerican Roots\u201d was Charles Ives\u2019s Symphony No. 2. The current season also includes Mahler\u2019s Eighth (completing a Mahler symphony cycle), Sibelius\u2019s Seventh, concertos by Nielsen and Lalo, and new music by Jeffrey Paul (the orchestra\u2019s superb principal oboe) and Erik Larsson.<\/p>\n Alongside all that, the orchestra pursues its signature Lakota Music Project, producing side-by-side concerts at Indian reservations that juxtapose classical music with Native American works.<\/p>\n But the most remarkable aspect of the South Dakota Symphony, for any observer as venerable as myself, is the attitude of the musicians. They are engaged. They are mission-driven. As I had occasion to tell them at an Ives rehearsal: \u201cThis orchestra is so friendly it\u2019s disorienting.\u201d<\/p>\n Many factors are in play. Sioux Falls is full of orchestras. The middle school I visited has three of them. The SDSO itself maintains three youth orchestras (I heard a rousing youth-orchestra rendition of the Mussorgsky\/Rimsky Night on Bald Mountain<\/em>).\u00a0 With 250,000 people, the metropolitan area is small enough to facilitate community. A recent influx of immigrants from North Africa and Southeast Asia seems assimilated with forethought and good will. But the singular vision of the SDSO music director, Delta David Gier, is paramount. He moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there. He concocted the Lakota Music Project. He has initiated programing featuring Ghanaian, Persian, and Chinese instrumentalists and composers. He has elevated the standard of performance to a startling height of conviction and finesse. He is a thinker and a leader.<\/p>\n The point of \u201cAmerican Roots\u201d (which like all Music Unwound programs migrates around the US, adapted to local needs and desires) is to introduce audiences to Charles Ives<\/strong><\/a>. He is arguably the most important American composer of classical music. He is little performed. His eccentricities are considered forbidding. He was long viewed with suspicion by lesser Americans like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. (I do not know of a subsequent American symphony as cannily assembled as are the five movements of the Ives 2, completed around 1909; such works as the Third Symphonies of Copland and Roy Harris seem lopsided and uneven by comparison.)<\/p>\n