TRENDS: “Song of America”

By Thomas Hampson

As a teenager, I enjoyed the usual pursuits—football, golf, messing around—but I also read poetry, in particular the American poets, Sandburg, Frost, Whitman. It was Whitman, especially, whose poetry provided my introduction to the American sound in text—its rhythms and vitality, its forthright and visceral beauty.

Around the same time, I began singing American songs in school and church choral groups. Then, when I discovered that I had a voice, I eagerly devoured the song literature by American composers as well as the European Romantic classics. At the same time I was developing my own American vocal heroes—Lawrence Tibbett, Robert Merrill, Nelson Eddy, and John Charles Thomas (the latter often called “the great American”). All of these musical giants programmed the songs of American composers in their recitals, on recordings, and on radio.

From the outset of my performing career I have chosen to tour the world giving recitals of concert songs, in addition to appearances in opera. I have always included American songs in my programs, and these selections have met with enthusiastic responses wherever I have sung them.

My current American recital tour is a joint project of my own Hampsong Foundation and the Library of Congress. This tour is a dream come true for me: It allows me to reach out across this land to audiences in cities large and small, singing entire programs of American concert songs by renowned composers like Barber, Ives, and Copland, but also by other deserving composers—less known, perhaps, and some more or less forgotten.

Between November 12, 2005, in Kansas City, Kansas, and June 3, 2006 in San Jose, California, I am to sing concerts across America that will be recorded and offered to a much larger world audience via new Library of Congress web site entitled “Song of America” (www.loc.gov/creativity/hampson). Through this site audiences will also be able to download music and texts, and learn about the sources of the songs, their texts and their history.

In preparing my programs for this tour, I have reviewed numerous concert programs of many of the great singers of the first half of the last century, both American and European, all of whom included songs by American composers in their recitals. Many of these exquisite songs are virtually unknown and unperformed today. We need these songs in our cultural landscape. Some listeners who attend the concerts on my “Song of America” tour may never have experienced a live song recital, much less one consisting solely of the concert songs that form part of our American cultural heritage. Which brings me to a vital adjunct of these tours. I plan to visit schools in each city to talk with young people about American song, its importance and its relevance to their and our lives.

For it is relevant. Today—perhaps more than ever before—our cultural institutions are being challenged from inside and outside our society. We need to take back the best of our culture—listen to it, look at it, read it, think upon it. It has sprung from great ideas, ideas honed and shaped by our unique heritage, drawn from many sources.

I am deeply committed to what the Library of Congress and the Hampsong Foundation have initiated. It is my hope that this will be the beginning of further projects dedicated to American Song, projects such as a web-based listening library, a series of radio and web-based documentaries about great American singers of the past, master classes on American Song, interviews over the web with my American colleagues about their lives and careers.

“Song of America” is a new and thrilling adventure for me at this time and place in history. While still in its infancy, the 21st century has already seen America’s institutions and culture dealt repeated blows. At this pivotal time, America’s art song literature provides a means of communicating—with the simple beauty of words and music—the truths of a nation born of an ideology whose language celebrates the individual. This language of heart and mind says everything about the culture that created it. And when we sing our own songs, those who hear us will experience the best of what freedom of thought and purpose can achieve in the creation of great art.