Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Kevin Condon.
The patriotic song “America the Beautiful” has been given diverse new versions thanks to pianist Min Kwon’s ambitious music project.

What I’ve always loved about the song “America the Beautiful” is its recognition that a country, our country, can never be perfect and should always strive to improve in ways that matter. “God mend thine ev’ry flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law.” Wow. So different from the “bombs bursting in air” of the official national anthem! Plenty of Americans would be glad to switch songs.

In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance.

Jesse Dorris writes at the Guardian, “Despite what you may have heard, there is no definitive version of the song ‘America the Beautiful.’

“Katharine Lee Bates wrote its lyrics as a poem in 1893, inspired by an ecstatic road trip from the Massachusetts house she shared with her longtime companion Katharine Coman to a teaching gig in Colorado. Over the next few decades, dozens of musicians set it to music, including a tune by New Jersey’s Samuel A Ward. The uniting of the text to a hymn Ward had previously composed in 1882 became, in time, a standard. In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance of it. But everyone from Pete Seeger to Tammy Faye Messner have tried their hand at Bates’s ode to equality between peoples and equanimity with nature. …

“The Korean-born, New Jersey-based pianist Min Kwon has spent her career thinking of ways to build communities through interpretation. As professor of piano at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, she curated concerts featuring university pianists at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall – like a 2015 performance of 50 variations on a waltz the Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli commissioned in the 1820s from composers including Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. …

“Kwon regularly leads masterclasses and tours around the world. Like much of the world, though, the Covid-19 lockdowns put all that on pause. ‘America was in crisis, we were all feeling very isolated. We were desperate for connection and hope,’ she says. … She began looking around at the country she had made her home, which, in the summer of 2020, was rising up against the racist killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor while buckling under the rise of the far right. ‘I do believe America, as a melting pot, is a heart of creation,’ she says. ‘I wanted somehow to celebrate that.’

“What would that sound like? ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ America’s actual anthem, was a little too patriotic for her taste. Bates and Ward’s ‘America the Beautiful’ fit the bill better. … And so, over the course of email threads and WhatsApp texts, lockdown Zoom calls and YouTube live streams, Kwon developed ‘America/Beautiful,’ a flock of 76 interpretations. ‘Some are prayers, some are protests, some are dreams or confessions,’ she says. … From American minimalist icon Terry Riley, for example, she says she was expecting long contemplation à la his classic song ‘In C.’ Instead, his ‘Crown of Brotherhood’ is, she says, ‘a piano ragtime, something so fun and in good humor.’ …

“Kwon has recorded each of the compositions for a five-CD box set, released in time for America’s 250th anniversary. She has also mounted performances of them, including a collaboration with the New York City-based non-profit Death of Classical, which, in June, found her on a black grand piano that barely fit into the main passage between the 30 or so family vaults deep within the catacombs at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. An impressively physical player, Kwon passionately negotiated avant-pop phenomenon Leila Adu-Gilmore’s ‘United Underdog,’ in which her moody processional through passages of the original composition grow into a finale so ferocious Kwon performed it via slammed forearms across the keyboard.

“A more gentle counterpoint arrived with a special guest, Vijay Iyer, who joined her at the piano for his ‘Crown thy Good,’ an elegiac duet in which each vanished into a vault behind them during the other’s solo selections. It became a moment of showing up for each other, of finding common ground and mutual creation. Kwon’s daughters happened to be born on President’s Day and the Fourth of July, she says. ‘I want to leave a body of new work for them, that later generations can look back on [and] say: “Lots of bad things happened, but look what came out of it.” ‘ “

More at the Guardian, here.