#american-music

#american-music

I've read books and watched Ken Burns documentaries, but my principal education in American history comes from our music. It's my pathway as I search for identity, for lineage and legacy, for community and for an understanding of this vast land, in all its confusing complexities and contradictions. I've learned that our music is a map of our history. It traces our roots and routes, and marks all the places where our journeys intersect to meet on common ground.

The biggest fan of Grateful Dead guitarist and co-founder Bobby Weir, who died Saturday at the age of 78, was perhaps his bandmate Jerry Garcia. "He's an extraordinarily original player in a world of people who sound like each other," Garcia told Blair Jackson and David Gans in 1981. Surely one of the most-traveled musicians of the past half-century, Weir helped create not only a personal style but a broader school of playing.

Dudamel filled the first two weeks of the season with a generous vision of America, leading works by the 20th-century New Englander Charles Ives, the unassimilated immigrant Béla Bartók, the 87-year-old New Yorker John Corigliano, and the young(ish) native Hawaiian Leilehua Lanzilotti. What unites them, and evidently excites Dudamel, is their disparateness - not just the range of backgrounds and time periods but the way they define American music as a great amalgamation.