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Karen and I saw the Wilton Singers celebrate 100 years of Leonard Bernstein. The concert was wonderful. Part of the program included a You Tube clip of Bernstein explaining American Music. His words are important because they highlight an important source of America’s strength.

“There are so many different qualities in our music that it would take much too long to list them; there are as many sides to American music as there are to the American people—our great, varied, many-sided democracy.

Maybe that’s the main quality of all — our many-sidedness.

Think of all the races and personalities from all over the globe that make up our country; and when we think of that we can understand why our own folk music is so complicated. We’ve taken it all in, French, Dutch, German, Scotch, Scandinavian, Italian, and all the rest, and learned it from one another, borrowed it, stolen it, cooked it all up in a melting pot.

So what our composers are finally nourished on, is a folk music that is probably the richest in the world, and all of it is American, in spirit, whether it’s jazz, or square-dance tunes, or cowboy songs, or hillbilly music, or rock and roll, or Cuban mambas, or Mexican huapangos, or Missouri hymn-singing.

It’s like all those different accents we have in our speaking; there’s a little Mexican accent in the Texas accents, and a little Swedish to be heard in our Minnesota accent, and there’s a little Slavic in the Brooklyn, and a there’s a little Irish in the Boston accent.

But they’re all American accents…”

–Leonard Bernstein, “What is American Music?”

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