Wyatt Ellis

American Song Carries National Contradictions Through Migration and Reinvention

Pianist Lara Downes frames “Hold These Truths,” an Aspen Ideas Festival performance marking America’s 250th anniversary, as a search for America through song rather than a patriotic retrospective. With Leyla McCalla, Valerie June, Nathaniel Rateliff, Joshua Redman and Wyatt Ellis, she argues that American music carries the country’s contradictions by changing as people migrate, borrow, adapt and reinterpret. The program treats spirituals, Creole songs, ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, contemporary songwriting and “Amazing Grace” as evidence that inherited songs stay alive not by remaining fixed, but by being remade.