In my most recent NPR “More than Music” show – “’Blowin’ in the Wind’ – Music and American Identity” — the conductor JoAnn Falletta asks, “‘How can we grow as human beings without the arts?” She continues:
“If you don’t learn through the arts as a child, you can’t open yourself up easily. I read once when I was very young that the arts help us deal with our mortality. That struck me, and it still strikes me. The only way you can have these feelings is if someone opens the door to you as a child, whether it’s taking you to a play which has an uncertain ending, or to a museum and looking at a painting that you can’t understand, or even a piece of music that might seem frightening but may be interesting.”
Of Bob Dylan, she says:
“He’s not afraid to force us to listen. Even ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — it’s terrifying, that nothing changes for the better. I don’t think there’s anything like that today. There are love stories. There are stories of anger, but nothing that forces us to look at ourselves, that makes us feel uncomfortable.”
The topic at hand is music that embodies the American experience today. I asked JoAnn and four others to pick a piece.
—John McWhorter chose a song from Jerome Kern’s Show Boat that mediates between Black and white;
—John Dease chose John Coltrane’s Blue Train.
—Allen Guelzo chose Charles Ives’s tribute to a Black Civil War regiment
—Timothy Long chose music that speaks to him as a Native American living in multiple worlds.
And I chose George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue: “It’s polyglot – it’s classical, it’s jazz, it’s Broadway, it’s Black, it’s Jewish. . . . And it’s always been controversial – patronized and deployed by generations of commentators as derivative and appropriative. And that controversy, in itself, surely tell us something about ourselves. . . . In fact it sounds like a work in progress – and what could be more ‘American’ than that?”
I also cals Rhapsody in Blue “unfinished” – there isn’t even a definitive version of the score. “I would call that a defining attribute of America – a characteristic of the self-made American genius. . . . And then there is a matter of unfinished business — what W. E. B. Du Bois was talking about when he famously called ‘the problem of the color line’ the ’problem of the twentieth century.’ Gershwin put it all together – and if the outcome isn’t integrated, neither are we.”
To hear the show, click here.
For more on Rhapsody in Blue, click here.
For more on Ives and Colonel Shaw’s Black regiment, click here.
For a Listening Guide, keep reading:
00:00 — JoAnn Falletta on Bob Dylan
9:00 — John Dease on John Coltrane
15:30 — John McWhorter on Show Boat
21:00 — TImothy Long on Earl Kim
30:00 — Allen Guelzo on Charles Ives
39:00 — JH on Gershwin
