In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her latest stop is New York for a visit with Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker.
Adam Gopnik knows a lot about a lot of things, as evidenced by his polymathic writing in The New Yorker magazine, but two of his greatest passions are American history and American music. We've had the pleasure of exploring these intertwined topics over coffees and dinners, on concert stages, and now in-studio at NPR's New York City bureau.
We are both the proud descendants of immigrants through Ellis Island, Jewish families who fled persecution and pogroms in late 19th century Europe and made their way across an ocean, along with millions of other hopeful souls, to find a better life built on liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My roots also go back to Africa, with my family's journey to the West Indies and eventually to Harlem. The deep love Gopnik and I share for the American songbook stems from its connection to our ancestors' gifts, their courage, their love of this country, and the sacrifices they made to ensure the freedom and opportunities of our own existence.
The origins of American music — which reach back to the original peoples of this land — are in the journeys that brought us here. From the sounds of drums and gourd banjos that came with enslaved Africans to the folk songs that made their way from every corner of every continent, our music binds us at the emotional center of being and becoming American.
In this conversation, Gopnik and I explore the musical expression of patriotism by new arrivals to our country — the admiration and gratitude that inspired Irving Berlin to write his anthemic "God Bless America," and George Gershwin to capture what he called "the musical kaleidoscope of America" in his iconic Rhapsody in Blue. American music has continued to evolve and expand, and will always welcome the rhythms and reverberations of everyone who comes here to make this land their home.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: It's 1918, the end of World War I. Irving Berlin is stationed at Camp Upton on Long Island, and he writes a patriotic victory song called "God Bless America." Then, 20 years later, there just happens to be another World War, so he brings the song back.
Adam Gopnik: One of the amazing things about Berlin is his matchless fertility. The old legend used to be that he wrote a new song every day — and that seems to be a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much of one. He produced the way a honeybee makes honey. He just wrote songs the way most of us breathe.
So here's Irving Berlin looking at Hitler coming to power in Germany — he's a Jew and a refugee — and you have this extremely patriotic song that took over the airwaves. Kate Smith sang it on her radio show in 1938, and everybody in America heard it. In 1940, both the Republican and the Democratic presidential candidates used it for their campaign song. It's practically a second national anthem. And Berlin is an immigrant to this country.
One of the fascinating things about the birth of American song is that it was famously written by immigrants. Now, some of them were second generation immigrants, like Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern. But some were fresh off the boat like Irving Berlin, and that is part of their peculiar aura of greatness. There's that beautiful hybrid marriage of Black American music, which is the real foundation and base of American song; Jewish music, which is something that Berlin in particular brought, with all those pentatonic scales and that feeling of klezmer; and the American WASP breed, which are part of the glory of American music.
I'm thinking about George Gershwin, also a first generation American: He's born in Brooklyn in 1898, when his parents have just arrived. When he's 25 years old, he writes Rhapsody in Blue, and he specifically called that piece his vision of the "musical kaleidoscope of America and the vast melting pot."
Rhapsody in Blue was one of those pieces that in my own life — I imagine it was for you, too — was a pivotal piece. When I was 12 or 13 years old, like many kids of my generation, my ears had been nurtured exclusively on rock and roll, on The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Wonderful things to have your ears nurtured on, but that whole world of the American Songbook was outside me. I bought Ella Sings Gershwin, one of the great recordings, and I thought, "Oh, this is good music. This is as good as The Beatles." And then I got Rhapsody in Blue, and it was my first full-fledged experience of classical concert music. It was, and remains, thrilling for me. And it is not only the most American of all music, but also the most New York.
I really wanted to understand the America Gershwin was writing from. I learned that in 1924, when he's writing this piece and celebrating the melting pot, they passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which practically shut down Ellis Island. They're basically saying to Gershwin and his family, you're not wanted here. For me, the piece then took on a whole new dimension of Gershwin claiming his American identity. Is it an act of defiance? Is it a protest song? What is he saying to his America?
It's useful to remember that the door to the "others" has opened and closed historically and episodically. It isn't that we had an open door which was then shut: We had an open door which was shut, then reopened in the 1960s, and then you had a flood of new immigrants. I never stopped to think about this, Lara, but it suddenly occurs to me that the flood of Hispanic immigrants that started coming in the 1950s and 1960s, in lots of ways, was not dissimilar to the effect of the Jewish and Italian immigrants arriving right at the beginning of the 20th century and their effect on music. If you were of a speculative historical mind, you could say that Lin-Manuel Miranda has the same relation to that Hispanic immigration that George Gershwin did to the Jewish one before.
I was thinking about all of the émigré composers who came at different times — there was the whole wave, post-Hitler, into Hollywood. But backing out from there, people like Rachmaninov, who came in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1918, became fervent patriots. There's a quote from Rachmaninov, who said, "This is the only place on earth where a human being is respected for what he is and what he does. And it does not matter who he is and where he came from." A statement about class and opportunity. He fell in love with this place, and made an arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that he would open all his concerts with. He was so proud to be an American, even though he had the thickest possible Russian accent and no one could understand him.
Now, obviously, there's the major — and toxic — bracket of the Black American experience for whom being accepted for who you were without anybody asking what you were is quite a different chapter. We have to preface everything we say with that understanding. But new composers arriving here felt anything but other: They felt themselves to be American. You know, Jerome Kern, who in many respects invented the American theater song as we know it, was Jewish and came over from England.
We can't underestimate the degree to which the embrace of America was so passionate in that generation. And why would it not be? They had gone from lives of not just persecution, but of eliminationist persecution, in the old country, into a rich, open and available life of opportunity.
But this also makes me think: OK, so you come off the boat and you don't have language and maybe you don't even have a skill. But as a musician, you had a pathway, you had worth. And whether you were a song peddler in Tin Pan Alley or you were Rachmaninov, you had a place and you had sort of a global community.
The reality that we make sounds in air with strange instruments, and that to those vibrations all of us make the emotional map of our lives — I think that's the closest thing to a secular miracle that one can ever find. But it is also the foundation of why it is that you could find a job if you knew how to play the piano, whether you were Chico Marx or George Gershwin. There was room for that because people's appetite for music to dance to, to sing, to understand their own experience with, was then, and remains now, so unquenchable. And I know that should be commonplace, but we must never allow it to become too commonplace. It's an extraordinary truth about all human beings that we make our lives out of vibrations in air. That's how we map our highs and lows, our heartbreaks, our climaxes, all to those sounds.
I've never heard anybody put it that beautifully. And to give truth to that tired trope that music is a universal language.
There are many different kinds of music, and it takes time to learn all of the pulses and syntax of a new music. But, the truth is, it doesn't take that long. It's not hard to vibrate to the sounds of Siamese or Cambodian music, or Lakota drumming — whatever it is we're drawn to. That's an extraordinary truth, and with it comes, I think, another truth that can make us genuinely patriotic as Americans. The American music that we've been talking about — African-American in its foundation, but with so many other flowers growing from that soil — is the great accomplishment of the last century. From 1915 till the present time, the world has been altered by American music, and just as there were American impressionist painters, there are French rappers and great Italian jazzmen. That's the international language of the past century. And we should have powerful, patriotic feelings about it.
My own work in American music has been very much driven by a search for identity and a search to understand this country and our complicated, conflicted history. But I think that's what we've all done. That's what every musician has done on a more or less conscious level. It's your search for understanding because this is your language. So you want to understand where you came from, and the place where you are. You can see that in Gershwin's music, and in Aaron Copland's music. You see that through all these 250 years — this search for place and meaning.
Absolutely. And the miraculous thing is that it can be implanted in the most improbable places. I think about the oddity that Motown Records was in Detroit. Who would think that there would be 10 geniuses living on the streets of Detroit who wander into the recording studio? And one of them will be a little blind kid, and he'll turn out to be, in his own way, as great as Gershwin — Stevie Wonder. That creation of possibility, I think, is hugely vital.
Right now, we're marking 250 years of this country. And from the beginning, people came here on boats — intentionally or not — and it's a story of immigration. When we talk about Lin-Manuel Miranda and this generation of composers bringing new cultural references into what we define as American music, I think that is the superpower that makes American music stand apart, and that will keep it evolving for another 250 years. It will never stand still, it will never stay the same. It will always take in these new perspectives and sounds of everyone who comes here.
But that depends on people continuing to come here. It depends on having an open door to new people and to new experiences.
Sometimes those new experiences can come to us long distance. I'm sure you've had this happen to you: You're taking an Uber back from Kennedy Airport, and the driver is playing some music that you've never heard before. And you sit up and you say, "What was that? Where does that come from?" And it's Senegal or Haiti or the Himalayas. And you say, "Could you share the link with me? Because I want to hear that again." That's the way our music grows and continues to evolve. Our culture depends on a constant flow of new experience, which gets absorbed and distilled into older kinds of experience; that's what the history of jazz is all about. But if you believe in an open society, you have to keep it open. And openness is political, but it's also cultural, and it also involves being always open to new sounds and new experiences.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
(Playlist image courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)
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