Elizabeth Newkirk is looking for America on her debut album
The American music market is three times larger than any other country’s. Yet, Houston pianist Elizabeth Newkirk thinks that American music is still in search of its cultural identity.
She takes listeners on a small journey of her thought process on debut album “The Americanist,” from Bright Shiny Things. The album contains works from the interwar period: “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel, “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin and the three “Africa” pieces written by William Grant Still. All were original orchestral works arranged for solo piano in a way not unlike putting a finger over a garden hose until the gentle stream becomes a blast.
Newkirk plays with a defiant style that has few lulls and defiantly demands a listener’s attention.
“The role of the soloist in classical music has really been diminished when it comes to how much individualism is expected,” she says. “It’s a very tight rope when it comes to whether you’re going to get to say something personal versus going out of bounds and not being a purist to the score. Over the past century, that’s been a theme. I wanted to choose something where I would have the responsibility to say something from my own point of view.”
The CD version comes with Newkirk’s essay laying out the way America asserted itself musically in the time between World Wars and how it lost that identity during the Cold War. She draws on the transcendentalists and the New Negro movement, which attempted to reconcile the need for Americans to be seen as individual first, and yet, also providers of community. The pieces she
plays highlight that theme.
“Valse” may have been written by a Frenchman to comment on one of the most celebrated of European music styles, but Ravel also incorporated the emerging world of jazz and blues into the piece. Gershwin’s “American in Paris” also plays with forms, changing time signatures as a kind of joke to illustrate the different walking styles of Americans versus Europeans.
Still, often called the dean of Afro-American composers, considered the question of what being an American, particularly a Black American, meant to his music.
“He was very forthright in that he was writing pieces that were homages to ideas of places,” Newkirk says. “People would assume he knew about Africa simply because he was Black. So he wrote ‘Africa’ to illustrate that he had no idea what Africa was actually like. This is the folklore he was raised to think Africa was.”
Newkirk’s essay is a moving piece of scholarship about America, arguably the best to be included with a CD since Negativland’s “No Business.” It captures the vibrant world of philosophy and music that was happening during the last period that “serious” music and popular music were one. Interwar works were instrumental hits that also expressed the American identity, something that’s become rare in the last 70 years. Newkirk sees serious music as inward-looking, academic and out of touch with the changing American mindset.
“The Cold War had the USA and the USSR promoting music in different ways,” she says. “The Soviets regulated music to be very plain, with no hidden messages, very populist and easy to understand. In the U.S., the idea was that in Freedomland you could be as avant-garde as you want, but then people had to be avantgarde to make the point. Gershwin became an easy target, and the whole pops concert was basically created around him. Composers went from being useful in a public sector to justifying Ph.D. programs.”