MN Encores: The MTT Files, 'What does American Music sound like?'

This month, as part of our 50th anniversary celebration, we delve into the Peabody Award-winning series, 'The MTT files,' with host Michael Tilson Thomas, to explore 'What does American music sound like?' In this episode, MTT explains Aaron Copland's musical transformation, and the political and artistic sentiments behind it. You'll hear Copland's greatest modernist work, the Symphonic Ode, with MTT conducting the New World Symphony.

When it originally aired, this episode was the second of two episodes on American music. Classical MPR with air part two (only) on Monday, July 24, at 7 p.m., or using the audio player above.

Part 1: What Does America Sound Like?

Before 1900, there was no real American concert music. But only 20 years later, composers had begun to break the hold of European standards for art and were experimenting in earnest with ways to portray an American sound.

In this program, Michael Tilson Thomas reviews what American classical music was like at the turn of the 20th century, and asks what it was about the cultural melting pot of places like Brooklyn that led us beyond Beethoven and Brahms, to our very own concert music. Aaron Copland's modernist compositions are front and center. Featured is a recorded rehearsal of Copland's little-known piece for women's chorus, "An Immorality," where Michael demonstrates the raucous sounds the composer was striving for in his earlier works.

Part 2: What Does America Sound Like?

As a part of Aaron Copland's move from modernism to populism, he created musical landscapes that were abstractions of the sounds he'd heard all his life-folk tunes, Jewish music, the blues and jazz. This music was so successful that we now associate it with the sound of America-with prairies, cowboys, and the heartland.

In this program, Michael Tilson Thomas explains Copland's musical transformation, and the political and artistic sentiments behind it. Included is a recorded rehearsal of the composer's greatest modernist work, the Symphonic Ode, with MTT conducting the New World Symphony, America's Orchestral Academy.

The MTT Files are supported by a grant from Koret Foundation Funds and by members of Minnesota Public Radio. The MTT Files are part of Keeping Score, made possible with lead funding from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and with generous support from The James Irvine Foundation, Marcia and John Goldman, Nan Tucker McEvoy, William and Gretchen Kimball Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

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