250 Years of American Musical Heritage

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This is the year for paying tribute to and celebrating the 250th birthday of America’s grand experiment in constitutional governance based on liberty, freedom, the rule of law, and individual rights. We honor the writers of our founding documents, as well we should, but we shouldn’t neglect our “musical founding fathers” — the unsung heroes and musical giants, composers, conductors, performers, and teachers, who gave us an incredible legacy, marching in lockstep with our historical development and evolution as a nation with musical accompaniment reflected in America’s milestones of accomplishments, celebrations, trials, and challenges.

At a time when orchestras and opera companies are running out of money, when musical theater production is reserved for billionaires, when American jazz musicians are more at home abroad, the future of American music is at stake. The question becomes, will America’s musical heritage fade into oblivion?

Our musical legacy is much more than just patriotic songs. A generation of amiable musical illiterates is ill equipped to make judgments about the survival of our musical institutions. Students cannot name their own senators, find another country on a map, or explain the reasons for the Declaration of Independence. Just as ignorance of our nation’s past makes it impossible to exercise sound judgment in the present, ignorance of our musical past makes it equally impossible for institutions to survive, although they represent the threads of America’s musical quilt.

Every Independence Day, we hear patriotic songs, but few know the story of such memorable music.

The term “Yankee Doodle” came from Dutch, meaning “Johnny Fool,” and was meant as an insult, but adopted by America’s rebellious colonists as their own. Years later, President Ulysses S. Grant said he only knew two tunes: One was “Yankee Doodle,” and the other wasn’t.

“The Marine’s Hymn” was based on an aria by composer Jacques Offenbach in his opera Genevieve de Brabant.

On shipboard, John Philip Sousa, the March King, learned of the death of his friend, David Blakeley. Sousa heard a melody dancing around in his mind. On land, he wrote down our future national march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Katherine Lee Bates, an English professor, wrote the words for “America the Beautiful,” inspired by a trip to Pike’s Peak, with music written down on a shirt cuff by a friend of the composer, Samuel A. Ward.

“Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the official song of the U.S. Air Force, was composed by Robert Crawford, “The Flying Baritone.” Though Crawford failed in his attempt to become an Air Force pilot, his song was chosen over 750 entries in a contest, beating out entries by Meredith Willson, composer of “76 Trombones,” and even Irving Berlin, the immigrant who wrote “God Bless America” as a thank-you to his beloved country.

As for our much-maligned national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the words were written by Georgetown lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key, an envoy for President James Madison. Key boarded a British vessel to secure the release of his friend, Dr. William Beames, but the British held him on board while their fleet shelled Ft. McHenry. Today, protesters criticize those nasty “bombs in the air” and the “rockets’ red glare,” but they were directed against Americans, and when Key saw that the tattered American flag had survived, he saw it as a symbol that our young country would survive the war of 1812.

America’s musical legacy is much more than just patriotic songs. The stories here come from a wonderful book, Our Musical Heritage: From “Yankee Doodle” to Carnegie Hall, Broadway, and the Hollywood Sound Stage by Dr. Mark Evans, composer; pianist; author; and founder of Cultural Conservation, an organization dedicated to preserving the best of culture and the arts. He identifies four great genres of American music: concert music, jazz, musical theater, and film music.

America’s concert music is a melting pot of musical styles and origins, symphonies, concertos, operas, and ballets inspired by folk tunes, hymns and spirituals, cowboy songs and European traditions. It was written by larger-than-life figures: Roy Harris, born in a log cabin on Lincoln’s birthday in Lincoln County, Oklahoma; eclectic Aaron Copland, from Brooklyn; Virgil Thomson, the Kansas City Francophile; Howard Hanson, the “American Sibelius” from Wahoo, Nebraska; and the Italian-American Paul Creston, among others. Renowned émigrés came to America seeking freedom and contributing to our musical identity, often as teachers, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ernst Toch, as well as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Aurelio de la Vega, two of Mark Evans’s distinguished teachers.

African-Americans brought African rhythms to the U.S. and developed the blues, spirituals, and eventually jazz. Jazz pianist Dr. Billy Taylor said that jazz developed steadily from a single expression of black people to a national music that expresses Americana to Americans as well as to people from other countries. It is characterized by simultaneous composition and performance and that elusive, magical element called swing.

Musical theater in America began when a producer added pretty French dancers, stranded when a theater burned down, to an unmusical drama. Years later, Away We Go, a musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein replaced the traditional chorus girls with a woman churning butter on stage. Skeptics said, “No girls, no gags, no chance,” but the show, renamed Oklahoma, became an American classic. “The Great American Songbook” was created by composers and lyricists who were true poets, including Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser, Frederick Loewe, Alan Jay Lerner, and Leonard Bernstein.

Film music began when orchestras led by conductors such as Irvin Talbot accompanied performances of silent films in huge theaters called movie palaces. Film scoring evolved into an art form, and some of America’s finest music was written for motion pictures.

Children, especially teenagers, are inundated by the sounds of rock, pop, and rap online and even in the classroom. They are not taught America’s true musical history in school.

For years, academicians resisted music education. When Lowell Mason introduced music in the public schools of Boston, many claimed that music is an illegitimate subject and that Mason shouldn’t be paid. On learning that John Knowles Paine had been named America’s first music professor, Harvard historian Francis Parkman declared, “musica delenda est,” or “music must be destroyed.” If students think musical theater began with The Phantom of the Opera and ended with Hamilton, or that film scores began with Titanic, they’re learning little.

Ronald Reagan famously declared that freedom is only one generation away from extinction. The same is true of America’s musical heritage. Parents and grandparents today have the opportunity to expose their children and grandchildren to the best of American music. You’re never too young to begin or too old to learn.

When we celebrate 250 years of American liberty, freedom, achievement, prosperity and innovation, we shouldn’t forget the music that accompanied and contributed tremendously to two and a half centuries of greatness. May the creative spirit and freedom that can produce both a Golden Dome and golden melodies survive and thrive for centuries to come.

Charles Holbrook is a retired geologist.

Image via Pxhere.