220. Multicultural Americans

The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Works for chamber orchestra by Foote performed by A Far Cry with Paula Robison, flute on April 21, 2013 and February 6, 2011.

• Foote, Arthur: A Night Piece
• Frank, Gabriela Lena: Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout

America has long been known as a place where many cultures converge. On our podcast, we’ll celebrate two Americans, from two different generations, whose music illustrates this multicultural inclination.

Born in the 1850s in Salem, Massachusetts, Arthur Foote was arguably the first major classical composer to be educated entirely in America. However, his work was undeniably influenced by European trends and aesthetics, as we’ll hear on this podcast. Foote traveled often to Europe, attending notable concerts, including Wagner’s first Bayreuth Festival. The score to A Night Piece, written for flute and strings, evokes elements of both German and French music of the late 19th century.

We skip ahead several decades for the next work on the podcast: Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout. Born more than a century after Foote, in 1972, Frank is a young composer of Jewish-Peruvian descent, and this piece draws particularly on her Latin American heritage. The work, she writes, “mixes elements from the western classical and Andean folk music traditions,” combining them such that they coexist as equals, without one dominating the other.