America

In June 2025, one of America's unanswered questions will certainly have been answered, but it will undoubtedly have posed many others just as unsolvable to our innocent minds... So what better than delving into American music to seek to understand, since composers from across the Atlantic were the first to ask questions about this strange and contradictory country-continent.

Ives already posed the question of American identity in his brief, elusive score of 1908. And while he refuses to give an answer, his combinations of atonal and polytonal levels and superimposed layers of different rhythms, pitches and sonorities undoubtedly reflect the country's complexity!

So we have have to travel the length and breadth of America to get the full measure of this enigma. Westward: spring in the Appalachian mountains, which mark the frontier beyond which the Far West of the pioneers opens up. These are the reckless, eager adventurers that Aaron Copland celebrates in his ballet for Martha Graham.

Those who stopped along the way in the vast expanses caught between the two oceans make up today's Deep America, so difficult to understand. To the East: New York, the world-city that brings together all peoples in a unique and creative melting pot! Gershwin is, of course, its musical emblem, blending Jewish klezmer, blues, Afro-American jazz and white classical music with a natural ease. Like chalk and cheese, two irreconcilable Americas?