The BSO’s “E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One,” a multi-year celebration of the plurality and singularity of American music will probe how “the crosscurrents of the art form reflect and parallel societal change in our nation.” The exploration will take place throughout this season and next with BSO and Boston Pops concerts at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood.” This season’s portion will encompass ten works by American composers at Symphony Hall through February 1^st as well as 13 complementary events around town. See details below.

In her pre-concert lecture preparing us for Barber’s Vanessa on January 8^th, Professor Carolyn Abbate of the Harvard Music Department promises to “trace the opera’s musical lineage and unpack how ‘American’ identity emerges in sound and form.” Let’s Be There.  In our Many-ness. With our multitudes. Professor Abbate will set the questions for a month-long journey.

No sooner was the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776 than a committee including Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and John Adams set about designing a seal for our new country with the motto E Pluribus Unum – “Out of many, one.” Geneva-born Jean-Eugène du Simitière inscribed the motto on a symbolic narrative of our evolving identity. In his view, Americans issued out of vastly diverse ethnic cultures (English, Scottish, Dutch, German, French and Irish) and had managed to coalesce to form thirteen distinct states. They were then freshly called by the cause of Freedom and the love of Justice to coalesce again into a federation, giving birth to the United States of America.

How did Tom, Ben and Jack conceive of the emergence of a distinctly American identity? Did they anticipate a “melting pot” giving rise to a whole new culture (Hector St John de Crêvecoeur, French aristocrat by birth and American Farmer by choice)? Did they aim at assimilation, at shaping ever-more-diverse waves of immigrants into the mold of a dominant Protestant English elite (Teddy Roosevelt)? Or did they envision a “salad bowl” (Reagan) or a patchwork of multiple, coexisting ethnic sensibilities made up of various degrees of “hyphenated” Americans?

At the heart of our American experience lies the rich problématique of American identity. Through ten works by American composers and thirteen adjunct events, the BSO invites us to rethink our national motto by exploring “the plurality and singularity of American music.” Does American music shed light on American identity? In what sense are Lenny Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and John Williams’s Piano Concerto both distinctly “American”? How is Samuel Barber’s Vanessa “akin” to Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass?

When Cicero pondered the question of social cohesion, he argued that, over and beyond the cohesion of family and tribe, the love of justice and of “liberalitas” (meaning “generosity” or “liberality” rather than freedom) sufficed to prompt human beings to bond in friendship as brothers: ut unus fiat ex pluribus. Simitière in 1776 captured Cicero’s meaning by framing the six core ethnicities and thirteen states with personifications of Freedom and Justice on either side. The temptation to band together as “Scots” or as “Dutch,” already transformed by the experience of acting collectively as New Yorkers or Virginians, would yield to a new resolve to band together as “Americans.” Hector St John was convinced that European immigrants would shed their feudal prejudices and metamorphose from wretched landless serfs into self-sufficient citizens. How would self-sufficient American citizens, drawn from every corner of Europe, balance “plurality and singularity” within their communities – and within themselves?  What foods would they put on the table and what songs would they hum while tilling the soil or forging their tools? The displaced Acadians lovingly preserved their rustic French music (Zadeco). The Huguenots who came to Boston in 1696 anglicized their names (Rivoire to Revere, Bon-coeur to Bunker) and soon gave up on a separate French church.

The motto E pluribus unum also has roots in St. Augustine’s Neoplatonism, where it signals the more intimate task of forging a unique individual personality out of the plurality of influences that buffet us from all sides. Nietzsche saw the challenge of forging a coherent personal “style” out of a multiplicity of influences as a modern challenge rather than as a uniquely American challenge. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he advocated the pursuit of personal excellence as the best means, but warned that a self-crafted identity remains fragile. Adversity tends to pull us back into earlier, more organic selves. Carlos Simon’s works are haunted by the experience of adversity. Part of their eloquence lies in the constant shifting between organic selves and personal excellence. Does he make us hear the thrilling but painful struggle for individual existence?  Simon wields gratitude to keep organic selves at bay,  celebrating their importance without submitting to them. When his music soars, it stands on the high point of a sword without giddiness or fear.

Must I be coherent? Walt Whitman famously embraced the plurality of voices within himself, refusing to be singularized. I contain multitudes:  yet nothing, perhaps, singularizes him more vividly than his refusal to be singularized. Inner pluralism as the hallmark of American identity? Aaron Copland is a good case in point. Vagrant Brooklynite who stumbled across the poetry of the prairie, he kept adding voices to his inner self. The affinity that he felt for Mexican folklore and the idiosyncratic ways in which he expressed it in his works charm and surprise us to this day. Does Copland’s music exemplify American singularity because it contains multitudes in a radically personal way? Does it express the singularity of a unique collection of adopted multitudes, redeemed from solipsism by the very multitudes that it contains? 

Along these lines, Michael Walzer interpreted the motto E pluribus unum as an aspirational ideal — an “alchemical promise” calling for constant transformation and revision. Protecting pluralism both within and without goes hand in hand with the pursuit of personal excellence. The very unity of our collective commitment to Freedom and Justice allows a plurality of creative cultures and personal lifestyles to emerge. American identity is a work in progress, requiring effort and commitment, creativity and vigilance. Experimentalism works in tandem with deep ethnic memory. The recently premiered opera The Monkey King by composer Huang Ruo and Librettist David Henry Hwang dramatically illustrates Walzer’s “many-in-one” approach to American identity. Its complex interweaving of Chinese and Western motifs achieves the organic fluency of a new language – a new American dialect, “no longer thyme or marjoram, but a honey all its own.”

Anne Davenport is a scholar of early modern theology and philosophy. She has published books on medieval theories of infinity and Descartes. Her most recent book is “Suspicious Moderate” on the life and works of the 17^th-century English Franciscan, Francis à Sancta Clara.

BSO to perform 10 works by American composers at Symphony Hall including Barber’s Vanessa (Jan. 8 & 10), Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Allison Loggins-Hull’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Joni (Jan. 15–17), an all-John Williams program featuring the Boston premiere of his Piano Concerto with soloist Emanuel Ax (Jan. 22–25), and BSO Composer Chair Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass (Jan. 29 & 31) Click HERE for more information.

The complementary events: 

Chamber music by Allison Loggins-Hull at the Boston Athenaeum (Jan. 13) 

On Being’s Krista Tippett in conversation with novelist Nicole Krauss at Temple Ohabei Shalom (Jan. 14) 

A Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert with guest pianist Seong-Jin Cho (Jan. 18) 

Three performances around Boston of programs for solo violin drawn from Johnny Gandelsman’s anthology of commissions, “This Is America” (Jan. 21, 25, & 26)

An illustrated talk on American road trip photography at the Museum of Fine Arts with curator Karen Haas, photographer Amani Willett, and David Campany of the International Center of Photography (Jan. 22) 

Emily Wells’ musical meditation Regards to the End at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Jan. 23) 

A pre-concert talk, John Williams in the Abstract, by Williams’ biographer Tim Greiving (Jan. 25) 

A live taping of the pop culture podcast Vibe Check with special guest Carlos Simon at WBUR CitySpace (Jan. 28)

Simon also gives a free “What I Hear” talk at New England Conservatory (Jan. 29) 

American Road Trip, a recital with violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss at MIT’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall (Feb. 1)