The Many Meanings of American

“The way to write American music is simple,” said critic and composer Virgil Thomson. “All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.”

Which means that American music could be European music. Or African music, or Caribbean or Indonesian. Anything. Paradox and perplexity, it seems, is the price of freedom.

“Music of and About the Americas” is the theme of the Ojai Music Festival this year, running Wednesday through next Sunday. Though not a particularly tight focus in the abstract--the theme could encompass works by Rameau and Puccini, to name only two composers who wrote “about” the Americas--in practice it has produced an intriguing, extended riff on ideas about music of the Western hemisphere.

In the case of pianist Paul Crossley and his Thursday recital at the Ojai Art Center, it takes in not only Copland and Villa-Lobos, but also his own tribute to the late Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Soprano Dawn Upshaw’s recital of American song on the following night at Libbey Bowl is American in the narrower U.S. sense, ranging from Charles Ives through George Crumb and John Harbison to Michael Torke.

During the day Friday, the festival hosts a symposium called “The New Musical Immigrants: A U.S./Latin American Dialogue.” This includes presentations by academics, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, and composers who themselves represent something of the diversity of contemporary “American” music--John Adams, Tania Leon, Osvaldo Golijov and Steven Stucky. Through phone and e-mail interviews, those composers previewed some of their thoughts on the music of the Americas, how it might be different from Old World music and how it plays out in their own pieces.

John Adams

Largely on the strength of his recent Christmas oratorio “El Nino”--the recording is due out this summer, and an excerpt appears during the Ojai finale, next Sunday afternoon--Adams has been slated to discuss “John Adams and the Cultures of Latin America” with festival director Ernest Fleischmann. Adams is more than a little embarrassed to be addressing such a congregation on a subject in which he claims no expertise, and he is ambivalent about the importance of cultural, rather than personal, identity.

“I can blow either way with that. On one hand, nationalism is really odious. Ideas of ethnic identity in music can rapidly become a nuisance,” he said from his studio in Northern California.

“But on the other hand, quite a bit of the music that I like had that impetus. One of the generating ideas of Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird,’ for example, was that it be ‘Russian.’ I like what’s English about Dickens, what’s French about Debussy, what’s Russian about Tolstoy.

“I think that there is no hegemony now on the part of Europe in classical music. In fact, what I see there is a huge interest--on the part of both musicians and audiences--in American music. Ives, Cage, Nancarrow, Feldman, the Minimalists. Zappa is very popular, and so is contemporary jazz.

“I’m going way out on a very fragile limb here, but I think Americans really never responded to the European notion of modernity. At universities, yes, but really creative and original American composers took their impetus from a very wide spectrum of sources. The best American classical music is very open, very embracing.

“It is very hip to say that European music is not the starting point anymore. I meet lots of young composers who say that Nine Inch Nails is more important than Beethoven to them. Well, sorry, that doesn’t wash for me. European music is still the backbone of my sensibility, though we might have a different name to distinguish what we do now. Why curse it by calling it ‘classical’ music?”

As far as “John Adams and the Cultures of Latin America” goes, he says the influence is all one way on him, and primarily literary at that. For “El Nino” texts, he drew on writers such as 17th century mystic Sor Juana and contemporary poet Rosario Castellanos, and he did his own program book translations.

“I have very loose filters. I let influences come to me. Or better, let’s say I’m open to serendipity.

“There is nothing much in ‘El Nino’ that sounds like Latin America. Certainly I didn’t intend it. I was very touched, though, to receive so many warm letters from Latin Americans about ‘El Nino.’ I was really worried about the opposite, complaints about my text-setting or about plundering another culture. The language is so wonderful.

“I lived in California for almost 30 years before I decided to learn Spanish. I’m now deeply involved in it and sort of regret that I didn’t do it earlier.

“The classical music tradition is not as strong in Latin America. Composers there seldom reached the level of importance of painters and artists, of novelists and literary figures. That is strictly a subjective opinion on my part, but I find that many Latin American musicians I know agree.

“[But] all that really matters is having a handful of individual talents. [Argentine] Astor Piazzolla is one of the major discoveries of the last decades, a truly great composer. It is so rare anywhere to have a Piazzolla, a Diego Rivera, a Rosario Castellanos.”

Tania Leon

Born in Havana, New Yorker Tania Leon received traditional European conservatory training while listening regularly to musicians who would much later become stars of the Buena Vista Social Club projects. She has lived in the United States since 1967, embodying many of the cross-cultural themes here with reflective grace. She notes that the major south-to-north influences come from vernacular styles, which is not surprising, since Latin classical traditions are basically the same as those in the north.

“It all has to do with the way we want to address our realities,” she said by phone. “I was enrolled in the conservatory when I was 4 years old and thought I was going to be a pianist. You have to learn Czerny, Chopin and Bach--nobody told me this is European.

“I feel that we receive a heritage, but we mold it to our own necessities. The founders of our conservatories came from the other side of the Atlantic, and they based the curriculum on what they knew best, what to play, how to listen.

“I can sing and play everything that the Buena Vista Social Club is doing because that is what I grew up hearing and singing and dancing. It was the music of the neighborhood. I might use it in my music, but transmuted. People here, because they know where I am from, might say it is ‘Cuban’ music, but it might not be ‘Cuban’ in Cuba.

“At first I was very hurt by this, but now I understand that we change and that the culture changes. People in Havana now think that I speak funny and my gestures are those of a New Yorker. Expressions there have changed as well.

“One thing very liberating nowadays, the process of judgment is breaking down. The walls actually started crumbling in the first quarter of the last century, although we did not recognize it. Now, we are being a little more democratic, recognizing the input of different cultures.

“Take George Crumb. Debussy was heavily influenced by gamelan and his harmonies became different as a result; Ravel was influenced by jazz and his harmony took a different direction. Crumb is the equivalent of these two put together. He studied Indonesian music, he sets texts mainly in Spanish, and he doesn’t have anything to do with Copland. Is he an ‘American’ composer?

“Or Lukas Foss. He thinks that he is an American composer. The fact that he was born in Germany means nothing. Culture, in a composer, is the sum total of what he or she wants to express.

“I am very curious. I am ruled by my ears. If I have the chance, one of the things I want to learn is tabla drumming, for example. I am very intrigued by the length of the phrase in Indian music. [This] is my notion of paradise: We all go around and around and get influenced by each other.”

At Ojai, Leon is represented by “Oh Yemanja,” an aria from her opera “Scourge of Hyacinths.” Based on a radio play by Nigerian Nobel winner Wole Soyinka, the opera was premiered in Geneva in a staging by Robert Wilson, and has traveled to companies in France, Austria and Mexico. In this aria, the protagonist’s mother prays to a goddess to protect her son, who is fleeing a totalitarian regime across a lagoon of hyacinths.

“That prayer has a lot in it. The deity is similar to one that my mother and grandmother sang about. My mother came for a visit, and I asked her, ‘Give me a clue.’ She only remembered about four notes of an old song, but [that] gave me some kind of image for the piece, [a way] to interpret this other mother.

“The music of Cuba is totally syncretic, from many styles and cultures: Amerindian, African, Spanish, Chinese--my grandfather on my father’s side was a Chinese Cuban. Some of the harmonies are ones I built myself, but there might be overtones, say, of some jazz progression.”

So is “Oh Yemanja” perhaps a prototypical “American” piece?

“Oh no,” she laughs, “it’s a Tania piece.”

Osvaldo Golijov

Osvaldo Golijov is another avatar of cross-cultural themes. Born in Argentina in 1960, he lived there and in Israel before moving to the U.S. in 1986. He has revealed a striking flair for many different types of music in a long series of arrangements for the Kronos Quartet, and he took the music world by storm last summer with a new Passion commissioned by Helmut Rilling for a commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death.

“I don’t know how it feels to be an ‘Old World’ composer, but I know that being a composer in America at the beginning of the 21st century feels very good,” he e-mailed from his home near Boston. “You have the chance to chart your path with optimism, there is a sense of possibility and, thanks to cheap technology, the possibility to produce and communicate your music without the interference of hierarchies.

“Looking back to the past century, I see that what has survived is not the product of dogmas but the music of shameless opportunists like Stravinsky, Strauss, Ravel, [Alban] Berg, Armstrong, Ellington, Miles Davis, the Beatles, etc. It’s a good lesson. Beware of ideology, if you have something to say, say it with the means at your disposal at any given moment.

“I think ‘open’ is American. There are certain realities that are stronger than others and generate what is identified as ‘American’: Jazz, rock, hip-hop--as opposed to music by ‘anybody who has lived here,’ like European emigre s or their American disciples.

“At the moment, I think that the Latin American immigration is a strong and irrepressible influence. Musically, it is tremendously rich, as is all music that emerges from widely varied sources. I’d say it’s hard to ignore. On the other hand, America will metabolize it and make it its own.”

Golijov’s “Yiddishbuk” will be played by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano during a Saturday matinee program at Libbey Bowl, and his “Lua Descolorida” will be on the Sunday finale by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“In general, I go wherever I feel I have to go in order to express a certain emotion. My aesthetics come from the words of the ugly one in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’: ‘If you’re gonna shoot, shoot; don’t talk.’ He survived.

“In the case of ‘Lua Descolorida,’ the influences were the rainbow voice of Dawn Upshaw, the discovery of Couperin’s melismas in his ‘Lecons de Tenebres’ and the possibility of setting the sweetest language I know: Galician--somewhere between Spanish and Portuguese. I wanted to find the intersection between a tear and a smile, like Schubert.

“The case of ‘Yiddishbuk’ is altogether different: The starting point was a collection of drawings and poems by children interned at [the Nazi concentration camp] Terezin. I wrote the piece 10 years ago, at a moment when I thought that music should sound like an open wound. I tried to distill raw emotional expressions into music, to somehow walk the frontier between cry and melody. But somehow the result is like a possible third quartet by Janacek.”

Steven Stucky

As a consulting composer to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a professor at Cornell University in New York, Steven Stucky has a presence on both sides of the continent and a long exposure to a steady stream of new music. Like the others, he takes up the “openness” theme in discussing the American experience in music, but from an almost Cageian perspective. If, as Cage thought, music is basically an attitude toward sounds, then American music says as much about the audience as it does about the composers.

“American composers have something of an advantage. Listeners on this side of the Atlantic are more open,” Stucky said by phone from an L.A. hotel room. “The content of American music can be anything. It is more and more difficult to maintain boundaries. The only value of most labels is to the Tower Records people, so you know what part of the store to shop in.

“There is a movement in John Adams’ Chamber Symphony called ‘Mongrel Airs,’ and that is an essential characteristic of the whole hemisphere. Not a melting pot, but the stew kind of thing, where different things exist side by side in great chunks.

“This kind of polyglot, mongrel culture is the most bracing for listeners and composers. It can be confusing, but I’m glad to be confused that way.

“After all, essentially how you get to be an American is, you show up and say you are. Like Varese getting off the boat, saying goodbye to Europe and writing a piece like ‘Ameriques.’

At Ojai, Cuarteto Latinoamericano will play Stucky’s “Nell’ Ombra, Nella Luce.” Any “American” aspects are subliminal and genetic, he says, not intentional. But by the same token, he believes it might appeal to American audiences more than to European.

“This is written in a rather simple, direct--you might say purified--language. It is more likely to get respect here than in Paris, where it might be deemed naive. It has [an Italian] title that might sound fairly banal in English [‘In Shadow, in Light’]--suggesting the basic opposition of dark and light, high versus low sounds, consonance versus dissonance.

“To my ears, of the four of us at Ojai, I’m the one who has the least audible ties to a local culture. In 1989, the Philharmonic played my Concerto for Orchestra, which struck me as completely European. But Mel Powell came up afterward and asked me, ‘Are you from the Midwest? Something about the slow movement struck me as music written by somebody from wide-open spaces.’

“I tell that story because here was somebody who heard something ‘American’ in my music that I don’t hear myself.”

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* Ojai Festival, various locations in Ojai, Wednesday-June 3, $7.50-$55. (805) 646-2053.