In part one of today’s playlist, I offered a Canadian perspective on America’s 250th. Now I’ll suggest an American’s perspective.
Min Kwon’s recently released America/Beautiful (Delos, 2026) is a massive set of variations on the familiar patriotic tune America the Beautiful. It brings to mind Liszt’s Hexameron (1839), a collaborative work curated by Liszt, with contributions of a variation each by Chopin, Czerny, Thalberg, Liszt himself, and a couple of lesser lights of the day, six variations in all.
Min Kwon goes further – a LOT further – pulling in 76 active American composers to provide a total of 82 variations, with a total run time of more than 4 hours. Kwon put this together as a Covid project, reaching out via Zoom to commission the pieces far and wide, creating a spirited musical community as she went. She premiered most of the music in live streaming events in 2021. Here’s an excerpt from those events (and yes, it’s that Terry Riley, the minimalist pioneer, going rag adjacent for this project).
Like the Liszt precedant, America/Beautiful has social/political undercurrents, inevitable and intentional, given the circumstances of its creation. Titles of individual contributions suggest the flavors: “End of the Dream“, “No Man’s Land“, “America, The Work in Progress“, “You Are Welcome Here” and so on. I don’t recognize the majority of composers’ names, but a good many are familiar: besides Terry Riley and Nico Muhly above, I notice jazz pianists Fred Hersch and Vijay Iyer, music critic-composer Jed Distler, rock drummer turned concert music composer Stewart Copeland. One of particular interest to me is George Lewis, avant-garde trombonist, computer music pioneer, and educator. Here is his contribution, as performed during the 2021 streaming premieres.
You might imagine that with so many and various contributions, the result could get messy. But not so: Kwon must have done a remarkable job of curation to inspire such a coherent catalogue of compositions from such a diverse crowd of music makers. She has also put it all together with finely-judged sequencing in this polished formal recording. And best of all, she gets inside every piece as she performs and records, which makes for a compelling and enjoyable listen, either in small samplings, or a play-through of the whole album.
Here is one more selection from the 2021 live performances. I recommend you check out the complete new Delos recording (in good Dolby Atmos), and its album notes available on the better streaming services. [ Apple Music | Qobuz | Tidal ]
