America's 250th at the Schermerhorn:
JoAnn Falletta on American Music, Memory, and the Stories We Tell
Few conductors have championed American orchestral music as passionately or as consistently as JoAnn Falletta. Across a career spanning decades and continents, Falletta has built a reputation not only as one of the world’s leading conductors, but also as an advocate for the breadth and diversity of the American musical tradition. Ahead of her appearance with the Nashville Symphony conducting America the Beautiful, Falletta spoke with Music City Review about the composers featured on the program, the evolving American canon, and the ways orchestral music can illuminate history, identity, and collective memory. From the mythic West of Morton Gould and Aaron Copland to the urban energy of George Gershwin and the deeply personal Tennessee reflections of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Falletta offers insight into a concert that celebrates both the richness and complexity of the American experience.
Music City Review [MCR]:The June 11 program is titled America the Beautiful. What attracted you to this particular collection of works, and what story do you hope audiences hear across the evening?
JoAnn Falletta [JAF]: This wonderful program, celebrating America’s semiquincentennial, was indeed a collaborative endeavor between myself and the Nashville Symphony artistic administrative personnel. It presents a cross section of the vast repository of American music, one that I believe will be particularly appealing to concertgoers.
“…a dynamic visionary institution giving voice to the music of today.”
MCR: The concert brings together music by Morton Gould, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and George Gershwin—four composers who each express a different vision of America. How do you see these works speaking to one another?
JAF: The Gould celebrates the great American west. We are most familiar with Copland’s picturesque suite of the west from his ballet, Rodeo, but Gould’s Cowboy Rhapsody is a wonderful compliment to this genre. Originating in Mexico in the 1500s, cowboys played an important role during the era of U.S. westward expansion. By the late 1800s, the American cowboy had created a reputation and iconic lifestyle that was glamorized in countless books, followed in the 20th century by Western movies and television shows. While the number of working cowboys has declined, the culture lives on throughout the West in attractions, museums, ranches, entertainment and rodeos such as the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody Wyoming, the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper Wyoming and the Pro-Rodeo Hall of Fame & Museum of the American Cowboy in Colorado Spring. And many of us like to watch the 21st century cowboys featured on the Yellowstone series.
Few works of American classical music evoke an idealized vision of the United States as powerfully as Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Premiered in 1944 as a ballet choreographed by Martha Graham, the work has become one of the most recognizable musical portraits of American life. Its spacious melodies, folk-inspired themes, and famous use of the Shaker tune Simple Gifts create a sound world associated with rural simplicity, hope, and the American frontier. To many Americans, Appalachia became a symbol of an earlier America—self-reliant, rural, religious, and closely tied to the land. The region has culturally been shaped by Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and England. Their traditions blended to create a rich and distinctive mountain culture.
The Brooklyn born George Gershwin began his musical career as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley. It was after his string of extraordinary Broadway musical successes, and his dramatic concert success of “Rhapsody in Blue” In the famed Paul Whiteman concert, where Gershwin turned his musical intentions to the social issues of the time including in the musicals “Strike Up The Band”, “Let ‘Em Eat Cake”, and “Of Thee I Sing”, and ultimately in the 1935 premiere of “Porgy and Bess”, based on a play by DuBose Heyward, who produced the libretto in collaboration with Ira Gershwin. Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was unlike anything that had appeared on the American stage. Combining elements of opera, jazz, blues, spirituals, and popular song, the work tells the story of African American residents of Catfish Row, a fictional community in Charleston, South Carolina. Today it is regarded as one of the seminal American operas. Gershwin insisted that the opera be performed by an all-Black cast. This provided opportunities for Black classical singers who were often excluded from major opera companies and concert stages. The work also placed Black characters at the center of a serious, large-scale musical drama. Unlike the minstrel traditions that had dominated earlier American entertainment, Porgy and Bess attempted to portray African Americans as complex human beings with emotional depth and agency. But while some regard Porgy and Bess as a masterpiece that humanized Black characters in a period of widespread racism; others see it as a product of its era that reflects paternalistic attitudes and racial assumptions.
Samuel Barber in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915 immortalized the words of the great American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, James Agee in possibly the pre-eminent American composition for voice and orchestra. Barber’s work is a setting of excerpts from a 1938 prose poem by James Agee that would later serve as a preface for the author’s Pulitzer Prize novel – A Death in the Family.
MCR: You have long been one of the foremost advocates for American orchestral music. How has your perspective on the American canon evolved over the course of your career?
JAF: It has been my pleasure to continue my exploration of American music. My first major foray into American compositions, mostly contemporary, occurred in the 80s when I became Music Director of the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic. Since that time, I have conducted over 170 works by women, by over 70 women composers, most of which were American. My associations with the Denver Chamber Orchestra, Long Beach Symphony and the Virginia Symphony all included numerous performances and premieres by American composers. The Buffalo Philharmonic, during my tenure, has commissioned works by American composers Richard Danielpour, Adolphus Hailstork, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Jessie Montgomery, Kenneth Fuchs, Miguel del Aguila, Daron Hagen, Michael Daugherty, Paul Moravec, Eric Ewazen, Jonathan Leshnoff, Rob Deemer, Caroline Mallonee, José Lezcano, Russell Platt, Randall Svane, Wang Jie, Chris Rogerson, and Paul Frucht.
MCR: Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is deeply rooted in the culture and landscape of Tennessee. Does conducting the work in Nashville add another layer of meaning for you?
JAF: It is very inspiring and powerful for me to conduct Barber’s ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915’ here in Nashville. James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in several boarding schools, the most prominent of these was in Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys. I spent several summers guest conducting at the Sewanee Music Festival including the honor of being awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, I attended many concerts at the Saint Andrews School and often thought of James Agee.
James Agee graduated from Harvard, worked for Time, The Nation and Fortune Magazine and was regarded as one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. During his lifetime, Agee enjoyed only modest public recognition. Since his death, his literary reputation has grown. In 1957, his novel A Death in the Family (based on the events surrounding his father’s death) was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The work by Barber is this extraordinary coalescing of two great American artists.
The poetry recalls a summer evening in Knoxville, Tennessee, as seen through the eyes of a child. The work is often viewed as a nostalgic portrait of the American South, but its emotional power comes from something deeper than simple regional sentiment. It evokes not only a place, but also a lost world, a vanished moment in time, and the universal experience of childhood memory.
MCR: George Gershwin’s music occupies a fascinating space between classical music, jazz, popular song, and opera. What do you think makes his music feel so distinctly American nearly a century after it was written?
JAF: Perhaps more than any other composer of the early twentieth century, George Gershwin captured the sound of a rapidly changing America. His music blends classical traditions with jazz, popular song, urban energy, and cultural diversity in a way that feels unmistakably American. Europe had long maintained a distinction between “serious” classical music and popular entertainment. Gershwin largely ignored that boundary combining concert-hall forms with the rhythms and harmonies of jazz and Broadway. Unlike Copland’s musical portraits of rural America, Gershwin’s America was urban and cosmopolitan. Gershwin works embody the confidence of the United States at that time. There is often a sense of forward motion and possibility in his music. Even when his melodies are melancholy, they tend to retain warmth and vitality. This optimism aligns with a broader American narrative of innovation, opportunity, and reinvention.
MCR: This performance arrives as many cultural institutions begin reflecting on the approaching 250th anniversary of the United States. What role can orchestral music play in helping audiences think about American history and identity?
JAF: The orchestra is both a magnificent repository of glorious music written over four centuries as well as a dynamic visionary institution giving voice to the music of today. When we hear a work by Dvorak, we are transported back to the rolling meadows of Bohemia in the late 1900th century, in Ravel we hear the urban sophistication of Paris in the early 20th century. Music can be a time capsule transporting us back to a previous era. We hear the fervor of the American revolution in the hymns of William Billing and in its orchestral garb compliments of William Schumann, we hear a European influenced America in the music of the Boston Five of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, and Horatio Parker, we hear the New England town hall gatherings and brass band of Charles Ives, the capturing of American vistas in works of Copland, Bernstein, Gould, Grofe, Daugherty, the mid-century symphonies of Mennin, Piston, Harris, Creston, Hanson, to name just a few examples. We have works capturing seminal events in American history such as Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road or Kenneth Fuch’s Falling Man or while not the original intent, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”
“Nashville has a magnificent and dynamic musical culture”
MCR: You have conducted orchestras around the world, yet Nashville has emerged as one of America’s most dynamic musical centers. How have you seen the city’s musical culture evolve over the years?
JAF: Nashville has a magnificent and dynamic musical culture. Of course the world over knows of Nashville for its glorious history of Country Music, but the orchestra has one of the most beautiful concert halls in the country, and the Nashville Symphony is in the forefront of American orchestras, especially in its performance and recording of American music. I am truly excited and honored to be giving this Americana salute concert here in Nashville with the Nashville Symphony.
MCR: For someone attending this concert who may be new to orchestral music—or perhaps knows Nashville primarily through its popular music traditions—what would you most like them to listen for during America the Beautiful?
JAF: For the newer classical music concertgoer this is a “must go to” concert. Each of these pieces, each with a different emotional palette, will speak to and touch audiences for whom there may be little to no background in classical music. One will be charmed by the nostalgic innocence of the Gould, by the southern ambience of the Gershwin, the poignancy of the Barber and the deep-rooted simplicity of spirit of the Copland.
Throughout our conversation, Falletta returned repeatedly to the idea of music as a living archive—one capable of preserving landscapes, communities, histories, and emotions long after they have passed. Whether discussing the frontier imagery of Gould and Copland, the cultural significance of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, or the profound Tennessee connections embedded within Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, she emphasized the power of orchestral music to connect audiences with both the past and the present. As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America the Beautiful promises not only a celebration of American music, but also an opportunity to reflect on the many voices and stories that have shaped the nation. JoAnn Falletta conducts the Nashville Symphony in America the Beautiful on Thursday, June 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
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