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\u201cMusic Unwound\u201d is an orchestral consortium supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It funds contextualized symphonic programs in collaboration with colleges and universities. To date, two topics have been in play. \u201cDvorak and America\u201d explores the quest for American cultural identity ca. 1900; the central work is Dvorak\u2019s New World<\/em> Symphony, supplemented by a \u201cvisual presentation<\/a>\u201d aligning the music with Longfellow\u2019s The Song of Hiawatha<\/em> and the canvases of Frederick Church, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. \u201cCopland and Mexico\u201d explores Aaron Copland\u2019s Mexican epiphany of the 1930s; the central work is the iconic Mexican film Redes<\/em> (1935), with Silvestre Revueltas\u2019s terrific score performed live.<\/p>\n Music Unwound\u201d is now commencing a second funding cycle with the addition of \u201cCharles Ives\u2019s America\u201d — which debuted in Buffalo three weeks ago and included two Buffalo Philharmonic subscription concerts plus half a dozen ancillary events at a museum, a library, and a university. The central work was Ives\u2019s Symphony No. 2 (1900-1909) \u2013 an irresistible Great American Symphony only premiered in 1951 when Leonard Bernstein rescued it from oblivion for a national New York Philharmonic radio audience.<\/p>\n That notwithstanding Bernstein\u2019s impassioned launch, Ives\u2019s Second Symphony never entered the mainstream symphonic repertoire records a discouraging lack of advocacy. It has simply not been performed sufficiently to acquire the audience it deserves. As a result, orchestras resist programming Ives\u2019 Second because it doesn\u2019t sell tickets \u2013 a vicious circle perpetuating the stereotype of Ives as a cranky composer of \u201cdifficult\u201d music. The \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d program \u2013 which tells the Ives story with a 30-minute visual track \u2013 is a necessary attempt to win audiences over to our most important symphonist.<\/p>\n Central to the presentation was a performance by baritone William Sharp (a peerless singer of Ives) of the hymns and songs that generate Ives\u2019s symphonic motifs. These range from the inane college song \u201cWhere Oh Where Are the Verdant Freshmen?\u201d, which Ives whimsically appropriates as a lovely sonata-form second subject, to Stephen Foster\u2019s \u201cOld Black Joe,\u201d which in Ives\u2019s Civil War finale signifies compassion for the slave.<\/p>\n These twin aspects of Ives\u2019s Second Symphony \u2013 the exuberance with which it subverts a hallowed European genre with American vernacular strains; the poignancy with which it connects to slavery and race \u2013 resonate mightily with Mark Twain\u2019s Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, which Ernest Hemingway famously called the starting point of American literature. What Huck Finn is to the American novel, Ives\u2019s Second is to the American symphony. And the moral epiphany of Twain\u2019s novel \u2013 the scene on the raft in which Huck humbles himself before the human being in Jim \u2013 parallels Ives\u2019s compassion for the African-American, a legacy inherited from his Abolitionist grandparents.<\/p>\n