‘As in my companion book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, my premise is that the “standard narrative” for classical music in the US – the one I grew up with, popularized by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein – shortchanges the American achievement. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, who called the “sorrow songs” of Black America “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation,” and Antonín Dvořák, who prophesied that “negro melodies” would find a “great and noble” American school, I begin not with Copland and the modernists, but with Dvořák and his protégé Harry Burleigh, who turned “Deep River” into a sublime concert song. I treat Charles Ives as an American creative genius comparable to Whitman and Melville. The standard narrative makes no room for a morbid Romantic like Bernard Herrmann – to my ears, the most under-rated 20th-century American composer, and not just for his terrific film scores. It omits William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – forgotten following its galvanizing 1934 premiere by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And it fails to reckon with Lou Harrison, whose majestic Piano Concerto may be the most formidable by any American. The films therefore argue for a longer, more eventful New World odyssey, documenting both democratic ideals and the legacy of slavery.’

No non-Western musical idiom has so impacted on the Western concert tradition as Indonesian gamelan, beginning with the Javanese Pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition: an epiphany. Sampling gamelan-inspired works by Debussy, Ravel, and McPhee, our film arrives at a paragon exemplar of cultural fusion – Lou Harrison – and a pair of concertos, for violin and piano, unsurpassed by those of any other American. The composer/scholar Bill Alves demonstrates the layered complexity of Javanese gamelan, and how it translates into keyboard textures composed by Harrison for Keith Jarrett. For Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion (Naxos 8559825), we tour the ‘junk percussion’ – including flower pots and washtubs – that Harrison made sing and dance.

Playing time: 74 minutes