What does America sound like? Santa Cruz Symphony’s season opening concert responds in spectacular fashion with a program spanning more than two centuries. It highlights trumpet fanfares, jazz-inflected rhapsodies, and melodies born from struggle and hope.
This patriotic concert begins, fittingly, with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key created the poem in 1814 after watching Fort McHenry survive a night of British bombardment. However the song wasn’t declared the national anthem until 1931.
Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony captures a different kind of American story—the immigrant’s discovery of a new land. Brought to New York in 1892 to help forge an American classical style, Dvořák soaked up spirituals, plantation songs, and Indigenous music, folding them into his Bohemian sensibility. The symphony finale conjures the sweep of the American landscape, closing on a note of triumphant hope.
Charles Ives took a more philosophical approach in The Unanswered Question. Inspired by Emerson’s poem “The Sphynx,” the piece stages a musical debate. A lone trumpet poses an existential question, flutes offer discordant, unresolved answers, and strings hover in Ives’s imagined space where truth might actually live.
George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, premiered in 1924, fused classical structure with jazz idiom into what Gershwin called a “musical kaleidoscope of America.” Written within weeks, the piece remains lyrical, playful, and unmistakably modern. Guest artist Christine McLeavey brings it to life on the piano.
Florence Price’s “Juba Dance,” from her groundbreaking 1933 Symphony No. 1, brought African American folk traditions such as call-and-response, syncopation, and clapping rhythms into the concert hall. Price was the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, yet her work largely disappeared after her death until manuscripts resurfaced in 1980, sparking a long-overdue revival.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings offers an emotional peak—a single theme rising through violins, violas, and cellos to an anguished climax, before dissolving into reverence. It was premiered by Toscanini in 1938 and later immortalized in the film Platoon. Critics have described it as almost unbearably moving.
Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, composed in 1942 amid the sacrifices of World War II, honored ordinary citizens rather than military generals. It was a deliberate contrast to the more militaristic fanfares commissioned alongside it. The slow, majestic build from timpani to full brass remains instantly recognizable.
Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, born from a plan to modernize Romeo and Juliet, became a landmark fusion of Broadway, jazz, and classical fugue. The Symphonic Dances, reworked from the 1957 musical, distill the story’s gang rivalry and its fragile utopian dream into pure orchestral drama.
Nina Simone’s “Come Ye” carries a different weight entirely. Simone trained for the concert stage but was rejected by the Curtis Institute. Instead, she found her voice in jazz clubs and later in the Civil Rights Movement. Her 1967 song stands as a plea for unity forged from that history. Guest vocalist Omari Tau brings this stirring piece to life.
Finally, John Williams’s Star Wars score closes the circle, reviving a lush, symphonic Hollywood tradition and proving that even music for a galaxy far away can feel deeply, gloriously American.
Together, these works trace a nation’s evolving voice—one built from conflict, migration, protest, and hope.
Concert Sponsors: Edward Houghton & Kathryn Cowan; Garth Illingworth in memory of Wendy Illingworth
Concert Co-Sponsors: Angela Chesnut; Lesley Harris; Vance Landis; John & Jodilynn Larse; Jeannette & Patricia Moretti
Artist Co-Sponsors: Roger Anderson; Dorothy Wise
