GTMF’s ‘Patriotic Pops’ celebrates all of America — JH News&Guide

With a salutatory drum roll introducing a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Grand Teton Music Festival’s annual Fourth of July concert start at 7 p.m. on the Center for the Arts lawn Friday — part of the opening week of the festival’s 64th season and a true signal that Jackson Hole’s summer season is in high gear.

This year’s “Patriotic Pops” concert will be led by GTMF Resident Conductor Benjamin Manis and will feature vocalists Sara Duchovnay and Clay Hilley.

“I think,” said Manis, “for a Fourth of July concert, you have to balance a few things. It’s not billed as a family concert … but it is a concert for families, so you want music that people know. They hear the beginning, and they go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s great!’

“You want to celebrate America, the things that we hope are still great about our country,” he said.

That includes the many people and places from which our greatness comes.

This year, in addition to standards that were composed by dead white males — favorite themes by Leonard Bernstein and John Williams, for instance — the program will include some less-standard samplings.

“Fanfare on Amazing Grace,” for example, is by Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork III, of Native and African American heritage, who at 84 still lives and works in Rochester, New York. Manis described the piece as a “rhapsody around the melody.”

“Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1” is one of six short pieces by Grammy-winning composer-pianist Joan Tower that responds to Aaron Copland’s orthodox anthem “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

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