‘Patriotic Pops’ reviews 250-plus years of American music – JH News&Guide
The Grand Teton Music Festival and guest conductor Donato Cabrera strove to create a Fourth of July “Patriotic Pops” program befitting a significant milestone.
“The fact that it’s the 250th anniversary got me thinking about the entirety of music-making,” Cabrera told the News&Guide. “Could I create a concert that, sure, it’s a typical Fourth of July concert, but also that tells the story of how music plays a part? What was out there at the very beginning until now?”
For its first 100 or so years, music in the United States was imported from Europe, such as hymnals brought across the Atlantic by the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Starting around 1770, some mostly self-taught composers began writing their own settings for psalms as well as fuging tunes (different from European fugues) and new styles of music for voices. They later became known as the Yankee Tunesmiths or the First New England School.
“I was able to find some pieces we all know,” Cabrera said, such as “a wonderful arrangement of ‘Yankee Doodle’ by Morton Gould,’ written in 1945. Gould took the theme, which dates back perhaps as early as 16th-century Europe, and worked up about three minutes of rousing variations that has since become a Fourth of July standard.
Another early piece — from Revolutionary War days — is “Chester,” written by William Billings around 1770. In 1956, William Schuman included Billings’ song in his “New England Triptych,” later expanding on it for a larger work. Schuman’s arrangement helped resurrect interest in the music of the Yankee Tunesmiths, much of which has been dusted off and performed, rearranged and conceptualized since.
“Then we go all the way to John Phillip Sousa,” Cabrera said, “Aside from ‘Stars and Stripes,’ a lot of Sousa’s marches aren’t performed that often.” As a French horn player performing with a brass band, Cabrera was introduced to other, lesser known Sousa marches, including “Liberty Bell March” and “Washington Post March,” which he will conduct Saturday, along with “Stars and Stripes.”
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