I Hear America Singing

The music of our country reflects the heritage that of what has come before us. It represents the good times, the bad times, the happy times, and the sad times. Most important of all, it reflects who and what we are and have been as a nation. Today’s Family First site looks at a site that tells about some of our musical heritage, and the roots that it came from.

Called “I Hear America Singing”, this site complements the PBS program Great Performances. It spotlights the music and song classics of Stephen Foster. Conceived and created by Thomas Hampson, hear you can see and hear, through the magic of the Internet, such classic songs as Beautiful Dreamer and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair. There is also a timeline to help place these songs in their historical perspective, as well as numerous links to complement the history of them. “Our songs are a varied as our people”, Hampson says, and this site reflects that message.
Song is a metaphor of the imagination; it is poetic thought encapsulated in music. It is born of the fusion of those thoughts in spoken rhythms, framed with melodies and harmonies. The recreation of those myriad inspirations arriving from the world of the humanities acts simultaneously as a prism of creation and a door to the imagination. Its performance depends on a partnership between singer and pianist. This experience for artist and listener alike permits the close examination of life’s successive moments for the reflection of one’s fuller existence. The great national poet Walt Whitman chanted the SONG OF MYSELF, but as he well knew that Self was both singular and collective. Whitman once said that the proof of the poet or the songmaker was that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. American song has been, in many ways, the mirror of our nation.
Like Whitman each of the poets and composers that are heard in “I HEAR AMERICA SINGING” issued invitations to their countrymen to travel with them–to explore shared thoughts and emotions. Song is, after all, nothing more or less than the soundtrack for the human experience. It is born of historical events and poetic vision, inspired by single moments in thousands of individual itineraries whose paths ultimately intersect and fuse. In the melting pot that is these United States, American songs have provided and will continue to provide the signposts on the road map of our collective journey.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/