Sounding Home: Orchestral Voices, the Pulitzer Prize, and American Identity at 250

In celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary and in response to the Society for American Music’s call to “Sound the Nation,” this lecture-concert explores how Pulitzer Prize–winning orchestral works articulate the evolving sound of “home” in mid-twentieth-century America . Presented as a special livestreamed podcast episode, this collaborative event brings together "Hearing the Pulitzers" and the UMKC Conservatory Orchestra under the direction of Dr. Christopher Kelts, with scholarly commentary by S. Andrew Granade.

The program features three landmark works: Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 4 “Requiem” (1944), Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1945), and George Walker’s Lilacs (1996). Together, these compositions trace a shifting musical landscape in which notions of national identity, memory, and belonging are negotiated through orchestral sound. Hanson’s elegiac symphony reflects wartime mourning and collective spirituality, while Copland’s iconic ballet score evokes pastoral idealism and vernacular Americana. Walker’s Lilacs, setting Walt Whitman, reconsiders national grief through a late-century…