BSO Celebrates American Music with Citywide Festival

Look at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, known for its incredible live performances and award-winning recordings, and what you might not guess is that many of the musicians sitting there, smartly dressed in black and white, are also expert packers. Used to shuttling back and forth between Boston and the Berkshires as well as traveling the world, members of the BSO are carrying their instruments with them this January and early February to various locations around the city—from art museums to a synagogue, MIT’s concert hall to WBUR’s CitySpace stage—in addition to performing at the orchestra’s home, Symphony Hall.

It’s all part of the BSO’s American music festival, E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One, which showcases the breadth of the nation’s musicians and compositions since the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago.

From City Stages to Symphony Hall: BSO’s American Music Festival

From January 8 to February 1, events such as talks, live podcast shows, and musical performances, complementing the BSO’s Symphony Hall concerts, will introduce audiences to the history and ideals behind the nation’s music and explore what it means to be American.

“It’s about opening our doors, going out into the community, and then finding places that are doing really creative, interesting content, partnering with them and bringing what we do, bringing our artists and our musicians, to their stages,” says Daniel Mallampalli, assistant vice president, artistic planning, for the BSO.

On January 22, walk down Huntington Avenue from the BSO’s home to the Museum of Fine Arts and head to the Level 1 auditorium for an illustrated talk about the American road trip, presented by David Campany, creative director for the International Center of Photography; Karen Haas, MFA curator; and Amani Willet, photographer. This event pairs well with the BSO’s musical exploration of the road trip genre in its February 1 concert at MIT’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall in Cambridge. Learn more about the concert, featuring BSO artist-in-residence violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss.

Across town, perched on the harbor, is another museum favorite: the Institute of Contemporary Art. The ICA hosts a one-night-only (January 23) live performance of “Regards to the End” by Emily Wells. Joined by 12 BSO musicians, drummer and composer Ian Chang, and multi-instrumentalist and singer David Baldwin, Wells will perform evocative pop and classical music alongside video of early AIDS activism, clips of modern and contemporary dance, and captured moments of extreme climate events. Plan to stroll the galleries, which are open until 9 p.m. that night and are included as part of the event ticket, while you discuss what you saw and heard.

Then, join the audience on January 28 for a live taping of a weekly podcast on pop culture and current events at WBUR CitySpace in Brookline. Hosts Saeed Jones and Zach Stafford are joined by BSO inaugural Composer Chair Carlos Simon, who will talk about what it’s like to be a composer in America today and how he created his choral-orchestral work Good News Mass.

American Music from 20th-Century Giants and Contemporary Trailblazers

Anchored at beautiful Symphony Hall, a National Historic Landmark at the corner of Huntington and Massachusetts avenues, the BSO has entertained hundreds of thousands of people since 1900.

Inside, the stage’s backdrop of organ pipes and a frame of gilded acanthus carving add a timeless elegance. Look around the audience and you’ll see many types of people, from all walks of life. The diverse cultures and influences represented among the country’s population is reflected in American music, too.

“This festival is about a celebration of an American identity,” Mallampalli says. “Of American art, culture, and tradition, and a reflection and a questioning of what it means to be an American artist in the 21st century.”

While pondering such philosophical ideas, sit back and revel in the hall’s acoustics as the orchestra plays. The festival brings to the stage 10 works by American composers, from 20th-century giants Leonard Bernstein and John Williams to contemporary trailblazer Carlos Simon.

The prolific composer Williams, largely known for his Hollywood movie scores like Star Wars and Harry Potter, brings to Boston a new work, a piano concerto written for musician Emanuel Ax (four performances January 22-25) that had its world premiere at Tanglewood last summer.

Newer on the scene, Composer Chair Simon came to the BSO in January 2024 and already has had several commissioned pieces performed. Good News Mass (January 29-31) draws deeply on the gospel heritage of America’s churches. Don’t miss his conversation with Vibe Check podcast hosts Jones and Stafford, as noted earlier.

From Many, One: Celebrating American Identity Through Music

E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One will live on outside of the festival as a theme for the BSO’s programming. It’s a way for the BSO to recognize the United States’ semiquincentennial anniversary, of course.

But it goes beyond that. It’s about creativity. It’s about community. It’s about discovering what it means to build something.

“Given how young a nation we are, we actually have tremendous strength in composition. The center of gravity has shifted towards the Americas and very much towards our part of the world in the past several decades, in the spirit of innovation and the risks that artists are taking,” says Mallampalli.

Throughout the rest of the calendar year—at Symphony Hall, across Greater Boston, at Tanglewood (the BSO’s summer home in the Berkshires)—the musical storytelling that’s happening onstage will continue to draw out the topics and ideas that artists are wrestling with right now.

“We have some really great programs taking place [at Symphony Hall] in the spring that are American: the new piano concerto for the Jussen brothers in April and Nixon in China, one of John Adams’s greatest operas,” Mallampalli adds.

To book tickets for the performances at Symphony Hall, Tanglewood, and complementary events around the city, please visit the BSO’s website.

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