While most of the country devoted the Fourth of July weekend to a celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a special circumstance gave Tanglewood’s first concert a different shape and an entirely different content than expected. As originally planned, a new work by Philip Glass—his Symphony Number 15, Lincoln—was commissioned by the Heartland Foundation for a first performance planned for June 18^th at the Kennedy Center. Before that performance could take place, however, the composer withdrew the piece, objecting to President Trump’s renaming the Kennedy Center after himself. Glass offered the premiere instead to the Boston Symphony for a performance at Tanglewood. The change of this major premiere called for a new program, entirely devoted to works by American composers, each paying tribute, in his own way, to Lincoln at the Shed on Sunday.

Glass has been an exceptionally prolific composer in a wide range of genres. His music called for pulsing rhythms in frequent complex patterns that begin in small and build to massive structures, at the same time building in harmonies that make use of steadily changing rhythms evoking greater complexity, leading to energetic shapes.

Over the years, his output has included many chamber works (among them a dozen string quartets), dozens of piano solos, many concertos, and a varied list of orchestral works. In an earlier stage of his career, he focused on operas, planned to honor significant historical figures, among them Lincoln in The Civil Wars, with Robert Wilson. In 2013 he wrote The Perfect American, which fused an account of the death of Walt Disney with the animatronic statue of Lincoln created for a Hall of Presidents. And in 2015 he planned Appomattox for a treatment of Lincoln’s role in the problematic legacy of race in this country. Other works of his were cast as operas featuring noted scientists and leaders of world culture, among them Einstein, Kepler, and Galileo.

Until he was in his 50s, Glass had not yet produced a work that could be identified as a symphony, but when he did, it was with a new seriousness of approach. The novelty was suggested by Glass’s friend, the conductor, who told him, “I don’t want you to be one of those composers who keeps writing operas and never writes a symphony.”He based several of his earlier symphonies, including the first, Low, on songs by David Bowie. He built others out of whole cloth. He chose Lincoln as subject for his fifteenth symphony aiming (in the composer’s words) at “the self-taught man who seemingly came out of nowhere, who spoke in a very poetic style, and whose legacy of holding the country together in a period during which it was ripping itself apart—seemed an appropriate subject to consider on this, our country’s 250^th birthday.”

The symphony comprises eight movements shaped by textual passages selected from Lincoln’s writing—the Lyceum Address (one of his first famous early speeches), selections from his autobiography, and selections from the Emancipation Proclamation and from his Farewell Address upon leaving Illinois for the last time, take up his responsibilities as President. These passages were partly sung, partly spoken, in both cases superbly, by baritone Zachary James, making both his BSO and Tanglewood debuts.The second Lincoln-based score was a suite drawn from John Williams’s score for the film “Lincoln.” The very title suggests the difficulty of the Civil War, but in this case, the drama is mostly political, treating the battle in Congress to pass the 13^th amendment to the Constitution, which would finally end slavery in the United States.The music of Lincoln is clearly American, and clearly to the central 19^th century, drawing like Copland’s music of the period (a clear source for Williams), in the form of gentle song and suggestions of lively dance. But darker moments call forth especially the solo trumpet passages, the Elegy for two trumpets, and the music associated with Lincoln’s second inaugural address, “With malice toward none,…” brought forth an exceptionally poignant tones from Thomas Rolfs.

The closer was a long-time favorite, Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait. Alec Baldwin read the words nobly, rising at climactic movements to recreate—for the third time this afternoon—the spirit of this noble and tragic American. The Boston Symphony Orchestra played with a full sense of grandeur on this historic occasion, and conductor Karen Kamensek led with full appreciation of the significance of the event, and Alexander Velinzon (violin), Blaise Déjardin (cello), and Elizabeth Klein (flute) contributed superb solos.

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.