American Ballads

American Ballads, six-movement orchestral piece on patriotic themes by American composer Morton Gould that premiered on April 24, 1976, during the U.S. Bicentennial. The piece was funded by the New York State Council on the Arts and first performed by the Queens Symphony, with Gould conducting.

Gould had begun his career as a pianist at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, but he soon established himself as conductor, composer, and arranger on CBS radio. Although his work there consisted largely of providing jingles and theme songs for a variety of products and radio shows, Gould took his work seriously. He told The New Yorker in 1953,

I’ve always felt that music should be a normal part of the experience that surrounds people. It’s not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.

Not surprisingly, considering this philosophy, Gould himself appealed to a wide range of musical tastes; band leader Glenn Miller recorded Gould’s music in the 1930s, and Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, then at the helm of the National Symphony Orchestra, commissioned a work from Gould in the early 1990s.

Gould’s American Ballads is an excellent example of his witty and accessible style. His suite consists of the following parts:

• I. Star-Spangled Overture (with reference to “The Star-Spangled Banner”)
• II. Amber Waves (with reference to “America the Beautiful”)
• III. Jubilo (with reference to Henry C. Work’s Civil War freedom song “Kingdom Coming [The Year of Jubilo]”)
• IV. Memorials (with reference to “Taps”)
• V. Saratoga Quick-Step (with reference to a colonial marching song “The Girl I Left Behind Me”)
• VI. Hymnal (with reference to “We Shall Overcome”)

By the time he was at work on American Ballads, Gould had been writing music with American references for many years. His noted American Salute, for example, dated from World War II. Nonetheless, American Ballads proved to be his most expansive work in this vein.