Many listeners may recognize these performances from their original appearance on CCH before the site's reset last year. Although the performances themselves remain unchanged, each recording has been carefully remastered and loudness-normalized to provide a more consistent listening experience across today's computers, tablets, and mobile devices.
Returning to this recital a year later has been a rewarding experience. Rather than revising the programming, I found myself reaffirming it. The sequence of works, originally planned as a musical journey through American history, geography, and identity, continues to tell the story exactly as I had hoped. Time has not suggested changes; it has simply clarified the ideas that were already present.
This first half explores America through intimate spaces and personal encounters, performed on the warm, lyrical Steere organ of the First Baptist Church in Owatonna, Minnesota (Evensong). The recital begins with changing winds and landscapes before gradually turning toward communities, reflection, and finally purposeful resolve. Rather than presenting patriotic music alone, these works invite us to experience qualities that have shaped American musical life: movement, endurance, beauty, reflection, communal joy, plaintiveness, and purpose.
Like walking through successive rooms of a museum or paths within a carefully designed garden, each piece prepares the listener for the next. Together they become less a collection of individual works than a single listening experience whose architecture is revealed gradually over time.
Program
0:00 Daniel Pinkham — The Wind from the East | Movement
1:27 Daniel Pinkham — The Wind from the South | Endurance
5:25 Emma Louise Ashford — Sunset Glow | Beauty
8:24 Emma Louise Ashford — By the River | Reflection
11:09 Henry H. Sexton Jr. — I'll Fly Away | Communal Joy
15:22 Ned Rorem — Entreat Me Not | Plaintiveness
16:54 Horatio Parker — Risoluto | Purpose
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