WHAT IS AMERICAN | I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

Three Projects Play to See — What is America to Me?

A. KORI HILL on June 15, 2022

What is American by PUBLIQuartet (Bright Shiny Things, June 17), which takes us on a music history journey; This is America from violinist Johnny Gandelsman (In A Circle Records, July 1), which highlights composers’ reactions to the pandemic, social injustices, and political volatility; and harpist Emily Levin’s GroundWork(s), which will feature new works for harp from 52 composers premiered in their respective hometowns over the next several years.

For PUBLIQuartet, What is American takes their personal conversations to a more public sphere. “There have been several different incarnations that contemplate this statement [what is American?] very differently,” shares violinist Jannina Norpoth. “What it truly means to be American cannot be answered or documented by any one person, and as our society has grown more divided especially through the pandemic, this album is intended as a call to reflection.”

What is American communicates a now standard maxim in American music historiography: American culture is indebted to Black creative practices. It’s a message woven through the album’s organization: we begin with words and repertoire that engage with enslavement, the Civil War, and Black folks’ place in the nation-state (e.g. poetry by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dvorak’s “American” quartet, and Rhiannon Giddens’ “At the Purchaser’s Option”). This leads to music and words from the 20th and 21st centuries (e.g. Ornette Coleman’s Law Years and Street Woman, Roscoe Mitchell’s CARDS 11-11-2020, and A’Lelia Bundles reciting the words of her ancestor, Madame CJ Walker). But staples like Dvorak and Coleman are not “straight” arrangements; improvisation reigns on this album. Whether intended or not, it calls to mind that history, even with its rigor, is a reflective approximation; our past is as fluid – and often even more unfamiliar – as our present.…