Ryan Raul Bañagale, Listening for America with the New York Philharmonic
This pre-concert talk for a Bravo! Vail performance by the New York Philharmonic with the preeminent pianist Emanuel Ax invites audiences to hear George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and John Williams’s “Piano Concerto” as two vivid chapters in the ongoing story of American music’s movement through jazz, popular culture, concert tradition, and public imagination. Gershwin’s 1928 tone poem imagines an American abroad, translating Parisian street sounds, urban motion, blues inflections, and the cosmopolitan energy of the Jazz Age into orchestral form. Williams’s 2025 concerto, written specifically for Ax, looks from another vantage point: its three movements evoke the pianistic worlds of Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson, not by reproducing their jazz worlds directly, but by remembering, abstracting, and reimagining their sounds through the concert hall. Together, the works suggest that American music is not a single style but a chain of translations: from street to stage, from improvisatory practice to notation, from popular idiom to symphonic color, from lived sound to cultural memory. Drawing on my scholarship in American music and arrangement studies, I will frame these pieces as examples of how composers arrange American identity through sound. The surrounding concert program—including “Three Dance Episodes” from Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” and Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait”—extends this inquiry further. In the context of Sounding the Nation at 250, the talk asks what we hear when we listen for America: not one voice, but a set of evolving, contested, and deeply resonant musical memories.
About the presenter
Ryan Raul Bañagale is Professor of Music at Colorado College, where he also serves as Director of the Crown Center for Teaching. His research focuses on American music and arrangement studies, especially the ways familiar works change meaning as they move across time and space. He is the author of Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford, 2014) and co-editor of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington, 2020). His critical edition of Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue was published in the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition. Bañagale has presented widely for scholarly and public audiences, including six previous pre-concert talks for Bravo! Vail.