Greg Stepanich

Orchestras could provide more American music

Here’s an interesting blog post from Henry Fogel of the League of American Orchestras about the dearth of our own country’s works on regular symphonic programs. Fogel cites the Swedes, who regularly feature their country's writers on their concerts.

This is not a new complaint, of course: Composers here have for decades argued that they were underrepresented on concerts in their own country, and they were right. One of the usual arguments against them was that American composers didn’t make good box office. You couldn’t program a symphony by Howard Hanson and expect to get a good turnout, the implication being that not only was the music unfamiliar, it probably wasn’t as good, either, as the European classics that brought in the crowds.

Has anything changed now? I hear more American stuff than I used to 20 years ago on concert programs, but not much. Yet I think something fundamental has changed, and that’s the access technology provides us to this music.

It’s much easier now for us to hear the orchestral works of people like George Whitefield Chadwick (pictured above) than it used to be, and any fair hearing of these pieces shows that they are every bit as competent as some of the mainstream European works that are heard.

I’m a fan of music, period, and I’ll embrace good music whatever its provenance. But American composers have written many good things that are too rarely heard (Fogel talks about his amazement at the strength of Barber’s Vanessa, for instance), and what I’d propose is that when orchestra programmers around the country look for a short work to open a program, they use something like Chadwick’s Jubilee instead of the Dvorak Carnival Overture, say (as much as I love that work).

Give us Still’s Symphony No. 2 instead of another reading of the Mendelssohn Italian (marvelous as that piece is).

All of these pieces are written in a conservative musical language that isn’t going to frighten anyone, like Ives still does. And obscure orchestras who want to make a name for their selves need simply reach into the large American catalog and start performing some of these things.

Perhaps the best case in point is the Seattle Symphony; conductor Gerard Schwarz is apparently strongly disliked by the rank and file, but that orchestra’s higher national profile has come about because of Schwarz’s championing of David Diamond, Howard Hanson and other American composers whose message is direct, powerful and often beautiful.

Forget the idea that America’s orchestras are European transplants that still are somehow foreign. The United States is an offshoot of Europe, and our orchestras have been making marvelous music for more than a century.

They’re as American as they can be, and their audiences await a more representative sample of what their fellow Americans have done to advance orchestral music.