Academy for American Classics?

When Diane Gillenwater was 10 years old, she was told she could play any instrument she wanted in her school music class...She learned to play the classics, but while she mastered those she longed to play a different style of music. In junior high school, she took a liking to folk music and guitar playing. And then — "I heard the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when I was in high school and knew that was the type of music I wanted to play," Gillenwater, of Topeka, said referring to the country- folk-rock band. "But there was no one to play it with, and no teachers to teach me how to play it."...It's that memory that comes back to her today when she is working with her fiddle and guitar students — ages 5 to 62 — at the Americana Music Academy in midtown Lawrence. Gillenwater and the other 34 instructors at the academy specialize in what is known as Americana or roots music...Americana, or American folk music, is a broad category that includes country, gospel, old-time guitar, blues, Tejano, Cajun, American Indian and Appalachian folk music — or any other style of music native to the United States or varied enough from its origins to be distinguished as a new form of music...A style is considered "roots" if it serves as the foundation for music later developed in the United States...School gives students chance to play Americana music, Jan Biles, The Topeka Capital-Journal,

It's good to get away from politics in a post. Culture has value too, though you'd never know that from the cutbacks in arts education in some states. The Americana Music Academy in Kansas may be more important to culture than we think. One of the real absences in what passes for American classical music, especially that being written by tonal composers today, is reference to the American folk tradition. European classicism would have taken a far more abstract, even strange path if its composers had ignored that tradition. As it was, Mozart, Beethoven, a huge list of composers who are now staples in symphony orchestra repertoire, freely quoted from ballads, popular songs, anthems, hymns, the folk tradition of their day. They also developed simple folk forms into exotically beautiful compositions. One can't imagine most of J.S. Bach without his constant referrals to and development of dance music. One also can't imagine jazz without the same sort of crossover between popular, folk and jazz itself. The student who learns to fiddle today may write a classical concerto based on a hillbilly theme tomorrow.

Luther