American Time Trip

The 200th anniversary of the birth of the United States of America is still four years away, but already the celebrations and national self-inspections are beginning--cultural as well as political. Last week in Washington, one of the first and most promising took form on the stage of the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall: a panoramic view of the U.S.'s musical past. The performers were the Paul Hill Chorale, a lively fixture on the capital scene. Called The Music Has Always Been There, their program was both a sonic trip into bygone times and an entrancing prelude to a projected series of concerts stretching into 1976.

Conductor Hill began the evening with his most startling novelty: The Star-Spangled Banner in its earliest published version (1814). The first edition turned out to have occasional variations in notation from the version in use today, betraying even more clearly the song's derivation from an 18th century hit tune called To Anacreon In Heaven. At the same time, as sung by the Hill Chorale, the slightly archaic harmonies had a classical dignity that suggested the effect the song may have had on those who heard it first.

There were more curiosities to come: Spiritual Music from New England tune books of the late 18th century, richly melancholy Negro spirituals, then a leap to Charles Ives' quirky but equally spiritual Three Harvest Home Chorales--still sounding sonorously dissonant and as futuristic as ever.

For Worldly Music, Hill presented 15 campaign songs from forgotten elections, many of them set to popular tunes of their day: "Oh dear, what can the matter be?/Women are wanting to vote!"; a rollicking boast of "Hoorah, hoorah, the country's risin'/ For Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen" to the tune of Old Dan Tucker; and a plaintive complaint about Prohibition with Old Black Joe's lyrics changed to "I'm thirsty, I'm thirsty/For the beer we used to know./I hear the gentle voices cal-ling,/'Have one, Joe.' " The truly grand finale featured excerpts from March King John Philip Sousa's El Capitan, an operetta that triumphed in 1896, then vanished into obscurity, leaving only the famous title march to mark its existence.

Future programs, like last week's, will be underwritten by private foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts and researched by Music Historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence, whose mania for musical Americana has resulted in the publication of the complete music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and of Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin (TIME, Feb. 7). With such continued aid and support, says Hill, "we want to do a dozen or more programs like this one. Even that would barely scratch the surface."

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