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 Massachusetts to Colorado. Over the next few decades, dozens of musicians set it to music, including Samuel A. Ward, whose 1882 hymn setting became a standard. In 1972, Ray Charles recorded a definitive performance, but everyone from Pete Seeger to Tammy Faye Messner has tried their hand at Bates's ode to equality and nature.
A New American Diabelli
The Korean-born, New Jersey-based pianist Min Kwon has spent her career building communities through interpretation. As professor of piano at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts, she curated concerts featuring university pianists at Carnegie Hall, including a 2015 performance of 50 variations on a waltz commissioned by Anton Diabelli. After that challenge, she says: 'I wanted to create a kind of new American Diabelli.' She just needed the right theme.
Kwon regularly leads masterclasses worldwide, but the Covid-19 lockdowns put everything on pause. 'America was in crisis, we were all feeling very isolated. We were desperate for connection and hope,' she says. 'I remember feeling sad and fearful, like everybody else. And then I thought: “Wait a minute, there’s got to be something as an artist I can do that is the opposite of destruction and death and fear.”' She looked at the country she'd made her home, which in summer 2020 was rising up against racist killings 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.'
From Prayers to Protests
The Star-Spangled Banner was too patriotic for her taste. America the Beautiful fit better. 'Lots of us have a connection memory to [the song] from childhood, or through inauguration or school graduations,' she says. 'It’s also simple enough that composers can take flight with it.' Over email threads, WhatsApp texts, Zoom calls, and YouTube livestreams, Kwon developed America/Beautiful, a collection of 76 interpretations. 'Some are prayers, some are protests, some are dreams or confessions,' she says. 'I was really surprised by the staggering depth and variety.'
From American minimalist icon Terry Riley, she expected long contemplation à la his classic In C. Instead, his Crown of Brotherhood is 'a piano ragtime, something so fun and in good humor'. Other compositions range from established figures like Nico Muhly, whose Refine rustles softly like fields of grain, to up-and-comers like Tyson Davis, whose American Tableau evokes human tears threatening to dim cities.
Challenging Perspectives
'When she suggested the project to me, I wasn’t feeling so positive about the country,' says composer and media artist Pamela Z, whose 1987 album Echolocation pioneered vocal processing. 'My thought was to think about it as a celebration of the people, not the political condition. Which,' she laughs, 'was an interesting challenge.' Her offering – America America America America America – harvests fragments from recordings of Kwon reciting Bates's stanzas, including stacked iterations of 'America'. Pamela Z seeds those sounds across a bed of melody derived from Kwon's intonation. 'This long list of Americas ended up sounding plaintive, even distressed,' she says. 'But it doesn’t tell people something specific. It just teases out this little bit of confusion.'
Performances in Catacombs
Kwon has recorded each composition for a five-CD box set, released in time for America’s 250th anniversary. She’s also mounted performances, including a collaboration with Death of Classical. In June, she played on a black grand piano barely fitting into the main passage between family vaults in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs. An impressively physical player, Kwon passionately negotiated Leila Adu-Gilmore’s United Underdog, a moody processional that grows into a ferocious finale performed via slammed forearms across the keyboard.
A gentle counterpoint came with a special guest, Vijay Iyer, who joined her for Crown thy Good, an elegiac duet where each vanished into a vault during the other’s solo. It became a moment of showing up for each other, finding common ground. Kwon’s daughters were born on President’s Day and the Fourth of July. '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.”' America/Beautiful is out now on streaming services and CD.
