Instruments of a Nation: A Timely Exhibition

Of Thee I Sing: National Music Museum

The National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota has just opened Of Thee I Sing: Origin, Heritage, and Patriotism, a special exhibition timed to America’s 250th anniversary that traces the country’s musical identity through the instruments that shaped it — from Native American traditions and the colonial period through the waves of immigrant innovation that defined the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I learned of the exhibition the day after the first screening of my recently completed documentary Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow. TIn the film, Neely Bruce informs of early American music in a quite didactic and entertaining way, and from his piano with remarkable examples.

Bristow lived and worked during the very period the NMM places at the center of its narrative: the age of immigrant innovators, of contested national identity, of instruments and traditions arriving from every corner of the world and being slowly, sometimes painfully, woven into something recognizably American.

The exhibition’s framing — instruments as mirrors of cultural background, experience, and identity — resonates deeply with our film’s central argument. We tend to think of the struggle for American musical identity as something that happened in the twentieth century, with jazz or the folk revival or minimalism. Bristow’s story pushes that argument back by half a century, into the Victorian parlors and concert halls of New York, where the battle over what American music was — and who got to make it — was already fully joined.

Of Thee I Sing: National Music Museum

The NMM exhibition includes instruments tied to immigrant makers and the patriotic imagery that decorated them, objects that carry the freight of belonging and aspiration simultaneously. Our film explores something similar through sound: the symphonies Bristow wrote as acts of cultural assertion, performed in a city that largely preferred to import its art from Europe. Leon Botstein’s performance of Bristow’s Fifth Symphony at Carnegie Hall — the event at the heart of our documentary — was itself a kind of delayed vindication, a century and a quarter in the making.

Of Thee I Sing runs through the summer at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. If you find yourself anywhere near the northern plains, it is worth the detour. And if the questions it raises — about who gets remembered, whose traditions get enshrined, what we mean when we call something American — stay with you on the drive home, you may be exactly the audience we made our Bristow film for.

For more information about the exhibit and the museum, visit nmmusd.org