America has a proud tradition of evoking its majestic landscapes and cityscapes in music.
There was once a time when native New Yorkers like Aaron Copland and Ferde Grofé composed odes to the American West; when Europeans like Darius Milhaud and Frederick Delius extolled the deep South; and when the Atlanta-bred Jennifer Higdon was surveying the wilds of Wyoming’s Teton Range.
In today’s America of blue and red states, such musical postcards are perhaps less welcome. But the works – and the ideas that inspired them – still stand. Below are 15 key examples. Note that some entries focus on cities more than states, but these inevitably say something greater about regional identity and folklore.
1. Alaska
John Luther Adams – In the White Silence
John Luther Adams has captured the windswept panoramas of rural Alaska in several pieces, but none feels so lonely as In the White Silence. A longtime environmental activist, Adams lived for decades in the 49th state. This chamber work, completed in 1998, uses plunking harp and percussion tones to suggest an Alaska in the grip of climate change: melting ice droplets patter against gentle, doleful string quartet melodies.
2. Arizona
Ferde Grofé – Grand Canyon Suite
American’s most celebrated natural wonder was curiously neglected by composers until Ferde Grofé completed his Grand Canyon Suite in 1931. A native New Yorker who lived in Los Angeles for much of his career, Grofé began making a series of trips to the canyon in his twenties, jotting down impressions of bird songs and sunrises over the painted desert. The Technicolour suite quickly caught on, thanks in part to its use in Philip Morris cigarette adverts and in a 1958 Academy Award-winning Disney live action short.
3. California
John Adams – The Dharma at Big Sur
John Adams moved to the Golden State a half-century ago and has been writing tributes ever since. One of his most fervent is The Dharma at Big Sur, a sun-splashed electric violin concerto composed in 2003. The concerto is meant to capture the ‘shock’ of arriving at the coastline and seeing not a sandy beach, but jagged cliffs pounded by ocean currents. Other influences include Jack Kerouac’s writings and the sounds of Indian raga.
4. Florida
Frederick Delius – Florida Suite
In 1884, Delius’s parents sent him to Florida, where he took a job managing Solano Grove, an old Spanish orange plantation near Jacksonville. Here, the 22-year-old ‘Fritz’ took counterpoint lessons from a local organist and heard spirituals sung by African American laborers. Two years later, after moving to Leipzig to study music, Delius documented his impressions in this wistful suite. Its four movements suggest a languid life along banks of the St Johns River.
5. Kentucky
Darius Milhaud – Kentuckiana
In 1948, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky spearheaded a commissioning project for the Louisville Orchestra. Among the first composers to be approached was Darius Milhaud, who had immigrated to the US during World War II. The result was Kentuckiana, written for two pianos and then scored for orchestra. Kentucky bluegrass music was on the rise during the 1940s, inspiring Milhaud to write ‘an overture in the French style on 20 Kentucky airs’, layered in a joyous montage.
6. Massachusetts
Charles Ives – Three Places in New England
Each movement in Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England is a personal response to a site in the region. ‘St Gaudens in Boston Common’ refers to a bronze monument that honours the 54th Massachusetts Regiment – a unit of black volunteer soldiers who fought in the Civil War. ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’ was inspired by a Sunday stroll near present-day Tanglewood. Leaving Massachusetts for the second movement, ‘Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut’ imagines a Fourth of July picnic where two marching bands meet, each playing separate tunes.
7. Michigan
Michael Daugherty – Motor City Triptych
Michael Daugherty has devoted much of his career to musical reflections on America. Motor City Triptych (2000) hits especially close to home for the composer, a longtime professor at the University of Michigan. The piece is an impressionistic portrait of metropolitan Detroit, starting with a salute to Motown, and followed by ‘Pedal-to-the-Metal’, a high-speed drive down Michigan Avenue, and the joyous ‘Rosa Parks Boulevard’, honouring the civil rights icon.
8. New Mexico
Aaron Copland – Billy the Kid
Despite his Brooklyn roots, Copland depicted many wide-open prairies and dusty deserts in his music. On a visit to Santa Fe in 1928, he told a friend that the parched New Mexico landscape seemed ‘frightfully austere’, like the ‘war-scarred battlefields’ of France, an impression that left its mark on Billy the Kid, his 1938 ballet about the 19th-century outlaw. Copland’s stark, open-fifth harmonies underscore ‘The Open Prairie’ sequence, followed by vivid depictions of cowboys, saloons and gun battles.
9. New York
Duke Ellington – Harlem
Duke Ellington wrote Harlem as a kind of concerto grosso for his big band and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, to be included in a (never-realised) suite about New York City. In his memoir Music Is My Mistress, Ellington offered a scenario: ‘We are strolling from 110th Street up Seventh Avenue, heading north through the Spanish and West Indian neighbourhood towards the 125th Street business area... You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognise the passage of those who are making Civil Rights demands…’ The work is a precursor to Bernstein’s On the Town and West Side Story.
10. Pennsylvania
Julia Wolfe – Anthracite Fields
Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio – scored for chorus and the Bang on a Can All-Stars – honours the sacrifices of coal miners in her native Pennsylvania. The title refers to the Anthracite (hard) coal, whose extraction was exceedingly dangerous.
In five movements, Wolfe sets miner testimonies, a list of those lost in accidents and the fiery words of union leader John L Lewis. Using chorales, rock, avant-garde and minimalist styles, Wolfe contrasts the miners’ lives with the conveniences that their sacrifices enabled.
11. Tennessee
Samuel Barber – Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Samuel Barber grew up in Pennsylvania, but had an instinctive feel for the pastoral images of Tennessee contained in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The orchestral song is based on a prose poem by James Agee that recalls his childhood in working-class Knoxville.
In an interview, Agee described his family’s neighbourhood as ‘fairly solidly lower middle class’, with ‘middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses, with... spacious back yards, and trees in the yards’. Barber, who was the same age as Agee, said, ‘It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away.’
12. Utah
Olivier Messiaen – Des Canyons aux étoiles...
Olivier Messiaen’s 12-movement portrait of Utah began with a commission from Alice Tully, the famed New York arts patron, who in 1970 asked for a piece to mark America’s bicentenary. Messiaen was reluctant, possibly owing to his dislike of New York. But when Tully told him that he could focus on another part of the US, he accepted.
In 1972, Messiaen and his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, travelled to Bryce Canyon National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument, where he transcribed bird calls and marvelled at the rock formations. The resulting piece for piano and orchestra is one of his most celestial and ecstatic. In 1978, Utah renamed one of its peaks Mount Messiaen.
13. Vermont
Walter Piston – Three New England Sketches
Piston spent his summers at a small farm near Woodstock, where his studio overlooked the Green Mountains. The vista left its mark on the last movement of 1959’s Three New England Sketches. Titled ‘Mountains’, the C major movement has a granite solidity in its maestoso opening and extended fugue. The first two movements, ‘Seaside’ and ‘Summer Evening’, are quasi-impressionistic and travel farther afield.
14. Virginia
Adolphus Hailstork – An American Port of Call
The bustling port city of Norfolk is the focus of Adolphus Hailstork’s An American Port of Call, composed in 1984 for the Virginia Symphony. In the composer’s words, the concert overture ‘captures the strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious) energy’ of Norfolk, rendered in teeming sounds. The music is brilliantly cinematic, evoking tidal swells, squawking gulls and cranes offloading containers.
15. Wyoming
Jennifer Higdon – All Things Majestic
Jennifer Higdon set out to capture the glories of Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park on a commission from the Grand Teton Music Festival for its 50th anniversary in 2011. The first movement gets straight to the point: the towering grandeur of the mountain range.
Higdon is no less adept at depicting the reflective surfaces of lakes and the ripple of rivers. At a time when the US National Park Service struggles with deep funding cuts, Higdon’s piece is a vital reminder of the country’s national heritage.
Pics Getty Images
