America’s musical heritage is as vibrant and diverse as its people. Whether explicitly patriotic or simply reflective of the American spirit, a wide variety of music has served as an expression of our national identity and values. The Great American Songbook stands as a cornerstone of this heritage. While not an actual book or collection of specific songs, The Great American Songbook encompasses the canon of show tunes, jazz standards, and popular songs that have endured through reinterpretation by artists across generations. Tonight’s concert celebrates this musical tradition alongside other folk songs, pop tunes, and military marches that make up the fabric of American music.

Irving Berlin was one of the most significant contributors to The Great American Songbook. Throughout his career, he churned out hit song after hit song, reinventing himself and popular music in the American image. Sid Ramin’s Berlin Patriotic Overture contains some of those songs, including “Oh! How I Hate to Get up in the Morning!” We hear more of Berlin’s melodic genius in Charles Sayre’s Broadway Showstoppers, which includes “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from Berlin’s 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, as well as “Cabaret,” “Mame,” and “That’s Entertainment.”

Another towering figure of The Great American Song Book is George Gershwin. Gershwin dominated Broadway with a series of musical comedy romps that captured the energy of the Roaring Twenties with their dance rhythms and jazzy harmonies. Many of the songs from his shows have become standards in their own right, including “Someone to Watch Over Me” from Oh, Kay (1926). Similarly, Claude-Michel Schönberg’s “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables (1980) has gained a life outside its original musical setting to become a modern pop standard.

In 1957, Ella Fitzgerald solidified Duke Ellington’s place within The Great American Songbook with her landmark album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book. Calvin Custer sets four of Ellington’s iconic jazz standards in Duke Ellington!, including “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing).”

Alongside The Great American Songbook, folk songs are also a vital part of America’s musical identity, with “Yankee Doodle” as one of the oldest and most iconic. Although the song may date back to 16th-century Holland, traditional lore states the text was penned in 1755 by a British army doctor named Richard Schuckburg. Originally intended to mock the “uncouth” American colonists who fought alongside British troops during the French and Indian War, the song was embraced by the very people it set out to ridicule. Americans adopted “Yankee Doodle” with pride, and it soon gained popularity on both sides during the Revolutionary War.

“Yankee Doodle” continues to inspire new musical arrangements to this day. The Grant Park Music Festival commissioned Robert Hanson to write Yankee Doodle Fantasy as a showcase for marimbist Josh Jones. Hanson will be familiar to audiences as the Elgin Symphony Orchestra’s music director from 1985 to 2011. During his tenure, he led the ESO to become Illinois’ first professional suburban orchestra and formed it into one of the country’s premier regional orchestras. 

“My Yankee Doodle arrangement will begin softly with the marimba playing with four mallets,” Hanson explains. “It immediately transitions to the tune ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ the folk song, and then George M. Cohen’s ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ You will also hear a bit of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ in the arrangement. There are four or five virtuosic variations of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ using both two and four mallets. The arrangement ends with a passage of impossibly fast scales on the marimba.”

Peter Boyer’s Rolling River draws its source material from another familiar American folk song, “Shenandoah.” Also of murky origins, the song likely stems from early 19th-century fur traders traveling down the Missouri River. Robert Wendel’s From Sea to Shining Sea continues our musical journey across the United States in a medley of popular songs, including “America the Beautiful,” “San Francisco,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Meet Me in Saint Louis,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town),” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Georgia On My Mind,” “Carolina in the Morning,” and “New York, New York.”

No concert of patriotic music would be complete without a tribute to those who have served in the military. Robert Lowden’s Armed Forces Salute pays homage to five branches of the United States Armed Forces with “The Caisson Song,” “Semper Paratus,” “The Marines’ Hymn,” “The U.S. Air Force,” and “Anchors Aweigh.”

A military man himself, John Philip Sousa began his career as an apprentice in the United States Marine Band, eventually becoming its music director. On Christmas Day, 1896, memories of his time leading the band in official ceremonies moved him to write his most famous march, Stars and Stripes Forever: “I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from the flagstaff in the grounds of the White House just as plainly as if I were back there again. I began to think of all the countries I had visited . . . and that flag of ours became glorified.” Three years earlier, in 1893, Sousa was inspired to write The Liberty Bell March after watching his son march in a special parade celebrating the return of the Liberty Bell to Philadelphia. The bell had toured the country en route to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

That same year, Katharine Lee Bates penned the lyrics to America the Beautiful. One day, while giving a series of lectures at Colorado College, she scaled Pikes Peak with some colleagues. “It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind,” she recalled. On her way to Colorado, Bates had stopped at the Chicago World’s Fair, which likely inspired the lines, “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears.” Although her poem has been sung to various tunes, it is now most associated with Samuel Ward’s hymn “Materna,” written in 1882.

—Katherine Buzard