Cliburn festival to examine America’s influence on music

Gershwin in a comedy club? Ravel in a jazz lounge?

“An American Influence,” the Cliburn’s four-day, five-concert festival that begins Feb. 18, will have classical music patrons heading all over the map to some nontraditional venues around Fort Worth.

“The festival is about American influence on music,” said Cliburn president and CEO Jacques Marquis, clarifying that American influences on music are not the same as American music.

“Further, we want to reach new audiences and connect with other arts organizations and move the concerts out into different but appropriate venues in the community we serve.”

Each of the five concerts — themed “Americana,” “Jazz,” “Musical Theatre,” “Hollywood” and “Classics” — will examine a particular, fundamental element of American culture that has played a role in the creation of classical music. American musicians will play pieces that explore “where U.S. popular culture and classical composition collide,” organizers say.

Performing will be pianists Ralph Votapek (the first Cliburn competition winner, in 1962), Spencer Myer (2009 Cliburn competitor) and Henry Kramer; soprano and Texas Christian University alumna Ava Pine; baritone Jonathan Beyer; and the Attacca Quartet. They’ll play works that range from Barber to Dvorak and from Copland to Korngold.

Concerts will take place at Van Cliburn Recital Hall, Scat Jazz Lounge, Four Day Weekend Theater, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Kimbell Art Museum’s Piano Pavilion.

It is the Cliburn’s second annual festival.

“Of course, the Cliburn is naturally very piano-centric,” Marquis said. “Last year, the Cliburn festival celebrated the music of Chopin, one of piano’s [most renowned composers].”

There is, organizers say, “an inherent tension” when trying to define an “American identity” in terms of music.

“The roots of American music include the folk songs of Appalachia and European immigrants, while the songs of Native Americans and African-American slaves were also influential,” writes Sandra Doan, the Cliburn’s director of artistic planning, in official festival program notes.

“After the Civil War, there was also heightened demand for mass entertainment; raunchy American vaudeville answered the need for populist entertainment. Like its population, American music was a ‘melting pot,’ blending together various elements to form different pathways to modern music.

“Because of this mix, it’s difficult to distill ‘the music of America.’ So instead, we have identified different threads and crafted five programs matching specific aspects of American popular culture with the music they inspired.

“While we highlight American composers that defined these elements, also represented are Europeans who admired the freshness of American idioms and used them in their own works.”

The opening concert, “Americana,” at Van Cliburn Recital Hall, will feature music by American composers as well as one Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak, who wrote prolifically while living in America.

His “American” string quartet was deeply influenced by the African-American spirituals of the Deep South; he composed it in the summer of 1893 while living in Spillville, Iowa.

The second concert explores the widespread influence of an American invention — jazz. This music also grew out of African-American communities from New Orleans, and after a crop of American composers began to explore it, the genre spread throughout the world.

At this performance, French composer Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano and Russian Nikolai Kapustin’s Concert Etudes will be played alongside selected jazz standards at Scat Jazz Lounge in downtown Fort Worth.

The third performance features what started as the European operetta and then took off as American “musical theater.” Many familiar names will be represented: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers.

It takes place at the Four Day Weekend Theater, home to award-winning Fort Worth comedy improv group Four Day Weekend.

The advent of sound movies opened a new venue for composers while it closed one for the musicians playing in the pit for silent movies. American composers took full advantage, starting with Erich Korngold, an immigrant from Moravia.

The accomplished composer-pianist’s association with symphonic film scores in the 1930s and ’40s helped pave the way for other classical composers to write music for Hollywood. The most famous living Hollywood composer is John Williams, whose selections from the scores of Star Wars and Schindler’s List will be played during the fourth festival concert.

It will take place at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in conjunction with its exhibition “American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood.”

The last offering, “Classics,” presents “American compositions that have entered the classical music repertoire,” the organizers say, and showcases the influence of European music on some American composers: Lowell Liebermann, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. It is a more traditional recital and takes place in the more formal setting of the Renzo Piano Pavilion at the Kimbell Art Museum.

Marquis said part of the Cliburn’s mission is to reach out to people in the community who might be fans of other genres of music, “other than piano devotees.”

With the “American Influence” festival — for which complete subscriptions and individual tickets are available — “it appears that we are doing so,” he said.

This story was originally published February 10, 2016 at 11:20 AM with the headline "Cliburn festival to examine America’s influence on music."