MUSIC

FREEDOM FIGHTERS
Every night of the NY Encounter, different facets of the American experience of freedom will be articulated in musical performances as diverse as the nation's cultural mix, finding their common ground in the heart.

BY JONATHAN FIELDS

The New York Encounter's fourth edition begins its music program on Friday night with the Manhattan Wind Ensemble–a form historically very close to the heart of the people. The wind ensemble is a descendant of the traditional community band where all would come together to play for pleasure. This symphonic band differs from the high-brow European orchestra which includes strings; it is more a folk style–of, by, and for the people. Decades ago, cities might have the high-culture string orchestra but the local towns always had a brass or wind band. The featured modernist composer is Charles Ives, one of the first American composers who achieved international renown. Ives, born in 1874, the son of a band leader in the American Civil War, grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, and attended Yale University. He was a successful insurance executive by day and composed by night, drawing on all aspects of the American popular and classical music traditions, combining hymns, songs, spirituals, marching music, and European classical music in the freest and most unexpected ways possible. The music seems wild and chaotic at times but absolutely American: raw and unleashed, dramatic, and sometimes dark and mysterious. The concert will conclude with Ives' The Unanswered Question (1906), highly unusual for its combination of trumpets, four flutes, and string orchestra. There had not ever been a piece of music composed such as this, and here the question of meaning, history, and the next century of American progress and freedom are delved into by the composer. The Manhattan Wind Ensemble, under director Christopher Baum, will feature Ives' work for wind band as well as works by other American composers.

Longing and tenderness. On the last evening of the NYE, we will hear music from another historic tradition by one of the most formidable jazz bands in the world, The Arturo O'Farrill Afro-Cuban Big Band. Arturo, another son of a bandleader, hails from Irish-German-Cuban-Mexican heritage. His band's music, quintessential American jazz, is the music of freedom. Latin, African, and European elements come together with improvisations performed with virtuosic dexterity and soaring melodies over compelling and driving rhythm. The ensemble moves together with fire and ferocity as well as with all the tenderness, longing, and blues that have accompanied the American human condition throughout its short history in its quest for freedom and, of course, for love.
Speaking of love, these two shows provide the bookends to the feature performance of this year's NYE, The Katrina Letters. This experience is part theater with the dramatized readings of, I would say, a simple journey of love described in a long-distance correspondence accompanied by music from European and American composers, performed by piano trio. All of these elements follow the drama of this incredibly touching yet not banal story of a young American girl waiting for her military boyfriend to return from World War II. The letters were discovered awash in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katerina devastation. Mr. Christopher Vath, a New Orleans native and a New York musician, composer, and performer wrote and produced this creation for a professional performance troupe. This contemporary experience is truly in line with the path of American music-making laid out by Mr. Ives and Mr. O'Farrill. It is full of the same originality and free exploration expressed within the context of an ensemble of individuals.
These rich and unique offerings demonstrate that the American artistic tradition is not one that relies on schematic constructions. As Fr. Giussani says in The Risk of Education, tradition must be judged by the heart in order for it not to ossify. There must be the discovery of meaning for one to be moved; this has been the strength of American music for over a century. With The Katrina Letters we find a rallying point; a place to look to help us, as American artists and musicians, keep the amazing value of this tradition alive for ourselves and also for the world. Now that's American!