An excerpt from the liner notes of Our American Roots by Jan Swafford:
For generations of composers, the cello has been a gift that keeps on giving. Its range, the widest of any instrument outside keyboards, starts nearly as low as a double bass and ends, some four and a half octaves later, nearly as high as a violin. It is unsurpassed as a singing instrument, the first choice for elegiac pieces, and its moods stretch from the most tender to the most ferocious. Bach and Beethoven first explored the depths and heights of what the cello can do. Beethoven wrote essentially the first sonatas for cello and piano, and he emancipated the instrument from the bass line in chamber and orchestral music. Since then nearly every composer has taken up the cello in some of their most beloved and far-reaching chamber music.
The works on this recording are all American and all essentially songful. They explore not only the expressive and technical range of the cello, but the range of what it can mean to be an “American” composer. George Gershwin was a musician of Russian-Jewish background whose most significant work, above all his opera Porgy and Bess, was grounded in African-American music in general and the blues in particular. Aaron Copland, also from a Russian-Jewish background, created a distinctive “Americana” style made from elements of folk music and jazz and, as in the pieces on this recording, cowboy music. George Walker is a composer of African American/West Indian background whose highly personal Cello Sonata defies categories, but who retains a subtle undercurrent of black American tradition. The Cello Sonata of the young Samuel Barber reveals another way of being a native composer, which is to hark back to the European
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