Berkeley Talks: Musician Lara Downes celebrates the sound of America

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Chloe Veltman: Hello. Thanks for coming early. Hi everyone. Well, this person needs no introduction. This is Lara Downs. This is her night. My name is Chloe Veltman. I’m a staff correspondent on NPR’s Culture Desk. Happened to be based here in San Francisco. I’ve been here for a long time.

Lara, you have been traveling all over the place working on this amazing initiative called The Declaration Project. It has many aspects to it. And it also has a connection to tonight. I’m wondering if you can explain to us what the project is and how it relates to what we’re going to be experiencing this evening.

Lara Downes: Sure. So what happened was I was working with Lincoln Center in New York on a project and they came and asked if I had any thoughts about what I might want to do for the 250th. And that was a long process and it ended up in a commissioning project with Lincoln Center.

So they’ve commissioned three new works, which I’ll premiere there on July 1. They are titled “Life,” “Liberty” and “Pursuit of Happiness,” three new works for piano and orchestra. And so in building that project, I like stories and I started thinking about the story that I wanted to tell and I started doing very deep dive into all of the important voices and all of the important moments going back 250 years, which is very quickly, very overwhelming.

And then I realized, especially in light of what this time is in America, that maybe I didn’t want to focus so much on the past and maybe I really wanted to focus on the future. So I’m lucky in that my job takes me to many places and I meet many people all the time.

And so I started infusing into what I normally do some very basic questions like, what do life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness mean to you? What does it mean to you to be an American? What do you envision for the American future? So I’ve been having conversations all over America for the last two years building that project and this project and so many things that I’m doing that are really just sort of reflecting on past, present, future continuum and the power, the immense power, really the immense power of American music in this story.

(Music: Paul Simon’s “America” performed by Lara Downes)

Chloe Veltman: And can you share a little bit about how all of this kind of feeds into tonight?

Lara Downes: Well, it’s music that goes way back. I mean, there are pieces on here that originate long before the founding of this nation, African American spirituals. I think we are marking points in the history, but I think really what I’ve tried to do is to create a very broad landscape of American music. Everyone on this stage is coming from different spaces in that landscape, folk music, Americana, jazz, roots, classical, gospel, and finding all the points of connection, which is just a beautiful thing. We’ve had such an amazing time in our rehearsals, just finding all the places where everything connects.

(Music: Tank and the Bangas’ “Mr. Bluebell” performed by Tank “Tarriona” Ball and Invoke)

Chloe Veltman: Now, I know you’re very interested in thinking about the context of how we think about music and what it means to be a country that’s 250 years old, but where are we at now? So how does music reflect the challenges that this country is facing today?

Lara Downes: So going back to 2016, we had a presidential election and the next morning I woke up here in California and I had to fly to Louisville, Kentucky to play a concert. I don’t know if y’all remember that day, but it was a very weird day to be anywhere, but especially in airports and airplanes and traveling to a very different state with very different situation.

I played a concert that night that I will never forget because I was playing American music from an album that had just come out and again, having interaction, conversation with the people who were there. And I think I just learned in that moment how much all of the emotions that we feel about being American, the affection and the nostalgia and the confusion and the sadness and the angers, all of it, all of it really is expressed in the music.

And so by using the music as a pathway to conversation and reflection, dialogue, it’s become an incredibly powerful tool and I think I see that it’s not just for me. I mean, I think we’re seeing that in the culture. There’s so many musicians who are really coming forward right now with new songs and just new forms of expression and trying to, I think, pull people together in some sort of common space about how we are all living this moment.

(Music: Willie Nelson’s Changing Skies performed by Lara Downes)

Chloe Veltman: Yeah. I mean, do you sort of think that music that is kind of protest-driven is the best kind of music for now or are there more subtle ways to present an idea of what it means to be American through music today?

Lara Downes: Yeah. I mean, I think both things are possible. I did a project around “Rhapsody in Blue” and it turned out that in 1924 when Gershwin wrote that piece, which he intentionally described as his vision of the musical kaleidoscope of America and the melting pot, that was the same year that the Johnson-Reed Act was passed and Ellis Island was shut down and there was really this closing of our doors and he was a first generation American.

And so we can think of “Rhapsody in Blue” as protest music if we want to, but I think that music throughout history in all times and places can be music of overt protest, but it can also be music that expresses hope when hope itself is protest. I mean, for me, that’s what we find in the old Negro spirituals, hope was a form of protest for people who were enslaved.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah. I also been thinking a lot about the musicians who had to leave this country because of things that were very, very difficult throughout history, people who were exiled as well as those who came here.

I mean, when you think about the people who have fled different countries and come here and created music here, maybe like Arnold Schoenberg, for example, the folks are escaping Europe during the war and then they’re kind of opposite to that, the people who fled this country and went, I don’t know, to places like Paris because racism was so intolerable here, people like Nina Simone, right?

Do you feel that their musics are somehow similar, that there are points of connection or do you hear a very different kind of sound between these different, the ways in which migration, should we say an exile expresses itself inside and outside America by Americans or others who come here?

Lara Downes: I think that music of exile, it always has two sides to it, right? It’s what you’re bringing from home and infusing into the new place and it’s also what you’re hearing in the new place and sort of your attempt to belong to that new place. I think that’s really clear.

I mean, when you talk about Schoenberg, not so much in his specific case, but in that time, all of those musicians who were immigrated during Hitler’s reign in Europe who came here, they were bringing this music that was so precious to them that was representative of this long lineage from which they had also been exiled, but where they put it so often, I mean, the sound of the movies comes from that whole generation who came here.

So what do you do with that European lush symphonic sound, here’s a new place where it belongs and then that spreads and informs what happens next in American music. So I feel like it’s always just these, what, like branches somehow intertwining.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah. I’m also curious to hear your thoughts about what the American sound is. Is there a way to identify music as specifically American? Does it have characteristics? I mean, you’ve made such a study your whole career of this American music and it’s so diverse and yet are there things that anchor it and make people think, “Ah, that is unmistakably American.”

Lara Downes: I mean, what do you all think? Don’t you kind of recognize American music when you hear it? I think it’s quite hard to describe it in words, but I think it is just very recognizable. I mean, there are some things, right? I think what we identify as American does have its roots in African origins, those rhythms, those came into our music really early on.

Lara Downes: So there’s that, but also it is just something about this blended sound. Where else do you hear African and Irish and just all these sounds coming together and we’re so used to it because it happened so early on as soon as people started coming here, their music started connecting.

(Music: Invoke’s “Sun Walker” performed by Invoke)

You would think after all these years I would have a perfect definition of what American music sounds like and I don’t. It’s just like, “You know, you know.” (Laughs)

Chloe Veltman: Is there anything that you gravitate towards specifically? Are there things, I don’t know, harmonic progressions, kinds of rhythms, things that really kind of make you feel like, “Ooh, yeah. I’m proud to be an American because of this harmonic progression.”

Lara Downes: I mean, I do love me some blue notes, yes. In fact, I’m part of this project. We play a group of pianists who play all the Philip Glass piano agent and the producer of that project, well, what she loves about it, we all have very different takes on Glass, but she’s like, “Here comes Lara with her Gershwin Glass,” because whenever I hear, he’s got some, in the particular etudes that I play, there are some blue notes and I’m just kind of digging into them.

Chloe Veltman: Well, I just can’t even imagine that, Glass.

Lara Downes: I think that project is coming here actually next season.

Chloe Veltman: So hang on, these blues notes that you’re putting in though, that’s your own invention or it’s in the music?

Lara Downes: No, no, the notes are in there. It’s just what I do with them. So my study of music did not begin with American music, it hardly ever does in the world of classical conservatories. So I was probably past my teens when I really started investigating American music.

So before that I was quite contentedly living in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. And when I found this music, all I know is that it resonated. It touched something really deep and instinctive and it’s kept me really busy ever since then.

Chloe Veltman: Can you identify what it is at the root that grabs you so much or that, after you came out of this period of dutifully studying your Beethoven or whatever you were doing? Yeah.

Lara Downes: Well, I think there are many aspects to that. And again, the specific ingredients, there are so many, but I think it’s probably a question of belonging. It’s a question of just feeling a belonging. And so for me musically in terms of identity, just connecting with a lineage that was more close to my lived experience as an American person, as a person of color, to find music that had, again, its origins in something that was closer to mine than bearded men who lived on another continent a few centuries ago. So that was nice.

But I think that’s probably the thing that we all feel when we hear this music. And again, I think because it is coming from so many places, everyone in this room has some point of connection to some piece of that origin. And so I think we do feel this kind of belonging.

(Music: Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More performed by Invoke)

Chloe Veltman: It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what it is that has made me feel like I belong here or felt like I wanted to come here. I’m from England. I’ve been here a long time. I came as a student, but it actually was a song that made me want to move here and it was a song about San Francisco, which my mother, who’s French, used to play for me. Maybe some of you are familiar with it. It’s a song by this French singer-songwriter called Maxime Le Forestier. It’s called “San Francisco.” Does anyone know “San Francisco”?

Lara Downes: I don’t actually. No.

Chloe Veltman sings lyrics from “San Francisco”: C’est une maison bleue, Adossée à la colline, On y vient à pied … no?

Lara Downes: No. Fantastic.

Chloe Veltman: Oh. Yeah, there’s a maison bleu in San Francisco. It’s still there. Actually, when I used to work for KQED, they had me do a podcast. I guess someone was asking about it, so I ended up producing a whole Bay Curious podcast on this thing. Go listen if you are curious about doing …

But this song when I was a little girl, this idea of San Francisco and by extraction, the United States, it seemed so mythical, so powerful to me because you’ve got this French singer who came here in 1972, was equally taken with this city, with this country as well, wrote this amazing song and this little girl in England’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.”

Lara Downes: That’s amazing.

Chloe Veltman: And I end up living here. And I just sort of think a lot about how music can inspire us in that way, even when we don’t even realize that it’s doing that.

Lara Downes: I’ll tell you a story. A few weeks ago, I was in Brooklyn and I was doing some work in a middle school and I thought they were going to have a piano in the classroom and I had a whole plan. I was going to play for the kids. We were going to talk about things and I got there and there was no piano.

So instead they had been working with a teaching artist who visits that school on a regular basis and what they were talking about was the question of whether music can change the world. And the kids said, “No, that’s dumb.” And roundabout thing, but I ended up showing them this video of Nina Simone live in Montreal in I think 1972 and she’s singing the song, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” And it is an epic performance.

It is so full of every emotion that you can imagine and the kids were pretty mesmerized. And afterwards I asked them, “OK, so 1972 was a time when the country was very divided. There were people who really wanted things to change and there were people who did not want things to change. So there’s probably lots of people who are arguing with each other. So do you think that your mind could more easily have been changed by having an argument with somebody who had a different point of view or do you think your mind would have been changed by hearing this woman sing this song?”

And they all saw that because right there is that magic equation of emotion and message and meaning and just like this powerful thing that music can do that words cannot do. So by the time I left the classroom, not only did they think that music could change the world, but they thought that they could.

Chloe Veltman: That’s amazing. Bravo.

(Audience applause)

(Music: Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come performed by Lara Downes)

And actually I do want to touch on this instrument a little bit, your instrument because the first instrument when you think about, when you think about American music isn’t necessarily the piano, right? We tend to think more perhaps about the banjo, other kinds of instruments, but also this is when you start to think a bit more, it is a quintessentially American instrument. When you think about honky-tonk, you think about, well, Nina Simone, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder.

Lara Downes: Ray Charles.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah. I mean, so many. So I’d just love to hear your thoughts about this particular instrument as a mode of expression for American music.

Lara Downes: I think it’s a good example, I mean, it’s not true anymore, American houses don’t really have pianos in them anymore, but they used to, I mean, I think the piano used to be a very powerful symbol of aspiration and upward mobility.

Chloe Veltman: Right. Every middle class household have one?

Lara Downes: I forget how many piano manufacturers there were in this country before the Second World War. So many. So Scott Joplin, who’s born in 1880, I forget what, in Texarkana and somehow finds … Oh, I know, he would play the pianos in the houses that his mother cleaned. And then at the same time in Texarkana, because of our stories of migration, there was this German Jewish tutor of a wealthy lumberman’s family and he heard this little boy playing the piano and so he taught him music. He taught him classical music.

So Scott Joplin always wanted to be a classical composer, which didn’t work out for obvious reasons. But then when he does become the king of ragtime, the reason that ragtime became so popular is because the music publishing was such a thriving business because everybody had a piano in the parlor.

And so I love this idea of ragtime so quickly getting handed off from these Black musicians, traveling itinerant musicians, who are playing in bars and brothels and everywhere else into these parlors of these proper ladies who are probably playing the music very badly, but just that’s how quickly music can shift, can change hands in American culture.

Lara Downes: I forget what your question was. So piano, the piano.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah. I’m just curious about your thoughts about the piano and it’s how it serves American music, I suppose.

Lara Downes: Yeah. I mean, it’s a big question. I do think that when we’re talking about a change in culture and what the current generation has access to, I do feel like that presence of a piano in that household was a big part of that. It wasn’t necessarily only what happens in schools and whether people can access concert halls, but just having that instrument in the house.

(Music: Kian Ravaei’s Variations on This Land is Your Land performed by Lara Downes)

But what’s interesting to me is that a different school a couple of weeks ago, a composition class and there are these kids who are writing symphonic scores with just a laptop. So the world moves on. Change is good.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah, the world moves on 250 years of this country, a lot of us are in a panic about many things and one of those things is AI and AI music, right? And yeah, I mean, where does that fit into the whole picture of how we celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country musically? Does AI have a place in any of this?

Lara Downes: Probably. I don’t know. But what I do know is that the human beings who are on this stage tonight, it’s always to me magic every time. All these people fly in yesterday and meet for the first time on this stage and just the interchange and the listening and the inspiration that happens. I don’t know. It’s a beautiful thing. Let’s not talk about AI. (Laughs)

Chloe Veltman: (Laughs)

Lara Downes: I wanted to set up a little bit these people who are going to be part of the concert who aren’t actually physically here. That’s tech.

Chloe Veltman: Sure.

Lara Downes: So I mentioned that I’ve been traveling a lot and talking to a lot of people and what The Declaration Project has been doing is collecting the responses to the questions that I mentioned. So throughout the concert, you’re going to be meeting some of those people who’ve come into my world along the way and you asked what is present in American music and I think all the things are present.

Lara Downes: It expresses really through at any particular moment in history, whatever’s going on, because there’s always something bad going on and there’s always some movement going on because we move forward all the time. But by sharing this music, by inviting people to know this music, what’s come back my way gives me so much hope and I think that you will find that as well, just what people have been expressing to me.

I mean, we’re here in the Bay Area and I think it is a bubble and we know that and sometimes we don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but I’ve been everywhere from Tuskegee, Alabama to Brattleboro, Vermont and Knoxville, Tennessee. And I’ve really tried to move myself outside of the traditional concert hall and really just find the people where they are. And I will tell you that this feeling of belonging and togetherness, it’s a very powerful thing and you’ll hear that tonight in what’s expressed

(Music: Andre J Thomas’ I Dream A World performed by Lara Downes and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir)

And it’s not through rose-colored glasses. There’s certainly an awareness of all the challenges that are facing us, but I think that there is a desire across sectors to really pull together and to have purpose and to serve community and just for things to be better. So that’s the good news.

Chloe Veltman: Yeah, I’ll take that. That’s excellent news. I love it. I want to hear a bit more about these three works that you’ve commissioned, was it “Life,” “Liberty,” and the “Pursuit of Happiness”? There are some delightful online videos actually where I could only watch two of them. There are three, I only saw two.

Yeah. So yeah, where we see Lara collaborating, being in this space with these wonderful composers and talking about two of these three pieces, what can you share about how these three commissions came about and how the different composers expressed these ideas? I mean, there’s such massive and seemingly esoteric ideas, I suppose. It’s hard to wrap our heads around life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What does that even mean?

Lara Downes: Yeah. I mean, what’s been interesting too is when I have been offering these as prompts, it’s not in the context of what did they mean in the Declaration of Independence. It’s really just reflect on these big ideas through a very personal lens and that’s what I invited the composers to do as well.

So the piece called “Life” is by Valerie Coleman who is, she’s based in New York now. I think she’s composed her in resonance with … Is she still with Boston? She had a resonance with Boston, who comes from an African American heritage place and her music reflects that sort of some Black Southern influences, but I think she really took the idea in a very intimate and primal sense, just life as being.

“Liberty,” I asked Arturo O’Farrill to write that piece. He’s a jazz pianist, Mexican jazz pianist, and Arturo’s perspective on music is fully global.

It’s really just about all of the origin places that all the music comes from. So it doesn’t stop until it goes all the way back to birthplace of everything. I think it’s about the freedom that music has to move around the world and to create new things and new sounds. And then “Pursuit of Happiness” is by Christopher Tin, who’s based in L.A. He writes a lot of film scores and it’s a very optimistic piece because the idea is that it’s not the attainment, it’s the pursuit of happiness and also the pursuit of happiness in a collective sense, not just a personal sense.

So it’s a really great, what do we call it, curtain closer? It’s a happy piece. And yeah, I think it’s going to be a wonderful concert. We have some young people joining the orchestra. It’s a concert that’s very much about also the future in all the ways.

Chloe Veltman: And this is July 1, right?

Lara Downes: July 1, yeah.

Chloe Veltman: In where are you doing it?

Lara Downes: At Lincoln Center.

Chloe Veltman: At Lincoln Center, right. So it’s happening right exactly when the whole country more or less is going to be the week that everyone’s going to be really celebrating this 250th anniversary. Yeah.

So I guess I’m just curious to ask you a little bit about as you’ve traveled around the country and you’ve talked to all these people and you’ve gotten more of a sense of where things stand for people now, especially with regards to music. What are your big takeaways for how we can use music to kind of carry us forward for the next 250 years, hopefully in a way that’s kind and positive?

Lara Downes: I just think music is going to continue to do the job it’s always done and there are such clear reasons why. I mean, as a person who’s trained in the classical tradition, so my first interface with music when I was a very little girl was music that was 300 years old. I think time has a different meaning for me a little bit.

Centuries don’t matter so much, but I think that the reason that we keep listening to this music that is centuries old is because it’s human voice, it’s the voice of people who lived on this planet who aren’t here anymore and it’s a window into their world, into their life, into their heart and soul. That’s what lasts. And I think that music certainly in times of trouble has a space of soothing and comfort and also encouragement. So I don’t think that’s going to stop AI or no AI.

It’s just, I think you know that according to people who know about these things, that there was music before there was speech. It’s a very basic need that we have of expression.

Chloe Veltman: All right. I think we’ll leave it there. Thank you, Lara. Thanks everyone for listening.

Lara Downes: Thanks for being here. I hope you liked the show.

Chloe Veltman: I hope you enjoy the wonderful evening ahead.

Lara Downes: Thank you.

(Applause)

(Music comes up: “This Little Light of Mine” (traditional) performed by all musicians at the event — Judy Collins, Tank “Tarriona” Ball, Invoke and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir — and the audience)